Surviving A Full SHTF Collapse In Bosnia

Many in the precious metals community are eagerly anticipating a complete systemic collapse of the financial system because as “preppers”, they expect to not only survive, but to prosper in a SHTF scenario.  We suspect however that the following MUST READ account of surviving the Bosnian war in the midst of a complete collapse of the grid will be eye-opening in just how difficult it is to survive a full-on Mad Max scenario, even if one has spent years preparing for it.

I am from Bosnia. You know, between 1992 and 1995, it was hell. For one year, I lived and survived in a city with 6,000 people without water, electricity, gasoline, medical help, civil defense, distribution service, any kind of traditional service or centralized rule.

Today, me and my family are well-prepared, I am well-armed. I have experience. It does not matter what will happen: an earthquake, a war, a tsunami, aliens, terrorists, economic collapse, uprising. The important part is that something will happen.

The following is my experience:

Our city was blockaded by the army; and for one year, life in the city turned into total crap. We had no army, no police. We only had armed groups; those armed protected their homes and families.
When it all started, some of us were better prepared. But most of the neighbors’ families had enough food only for a few days. Some had pistols; a few had AK-47s or shotguns.

After a month or two, gangs started operating, destroying everything. Hospitals, for example, turned into slaughterhouses. There was no more police. About 80 percent of the hospital staff were gone. I got lucky. My family at the time was fairly large (15 people in a large house, six pistols, three AKs), and we survived (most of us, at least).

The Americans dropped MREs every 10 days to help blockaded cities. This was never enough. Some — very few — had gardens. It took three months for the first rumors to spread of men dying from hunger and cold. We removed all the doors, the window frames from abandoned houses, ripped up the floors and burned the furniture for heat. Many died from diseases, especially from the water (two from my own family). We drank mostly rainwater, ate pigeons and even rats.

Money soon became worthless. We returned to an exchange. For a tin can of tushonka (think Soviet spam), you could have a woman. (It is hard to speak of it, but it is true.) Most of the women who sold themselves were desperate mothers.

Arms, ammunition, candles, lighters, antibiotics, gasoline, batteries and food. We fought for these things like animals. In these situations, it all changes. Men become monsters. It was disgusting.

Strength was in numbers. A man living alone getting killed and robbed would be just a matter of time, even if he was armed.

Today, me and my family are well-prepared, I am well-armed. I have experience.

It does not matter what will happen: an earthquake, a war, a tsunami, aliens, terrorists, economic collapse, uprising. The important part is that something will happen.

Here’s my experience: You can’t make it on your own. Don’t stay apart from your family; prepare together, choose reliable friends.

1. How to move safely in a city

The city was divided into communities along streets. Our street (15 to 20 homes) had patrols (five armed men every week) to watch for gangs and for our enemies.

All the exchanges occurred in the street. About 5 kilometers away was an entire street for trading, all well-organized; but going there was too dangerous because of the snipers. You could also get robbed by bandits. I only went there twice, when I needed something really rare (list of medicine, mainly antibiotics, of the French original of the texts).

Nobody used automobiles in the city: The streets were blocked by wreckage and by abandoned cars. Gasoline was very expensive. If one needed to go somewhere, that was done at night. Never travel alone or in groups that were too big — always two to three men. All armed, travel swift, in the shadows, cross streets through ruins, not along open streets.

There were many gangs 10 to 15 men strong, some as large as 50 men. But there were also many normal men, like you and me, fathers and grandfathers, who killed and robbed. There were no “good” and “bad” men. Most were in the middle and ready for the worst.

2. What about wood? Your home city is surrounded by woods; why did you burn doors and furniture?

There were not that many woods around the city. It was very beautiful — restaurants, cinemas, schools, even an airport. Every tree in the city and in the city park was cut down for fuel in the first two months.

Without electricity for cooking and heat, we burned anything that burned. Furniture, doors, flooring: That wood burns swiftly. We had no suburbs or suburban farms. The enemy was in the suburbs. We were surrounded. Even in the city you never knew who was the enemy at any given point.

3. What knowledge was useful to you in that period?

To imagine the situation a bit better, you should know it was practically a return to the Stone Age.

For example, I had a container of cooking gas. But I did not use it for heat. That would be too expensive! I attached a nozzle to it I made myself and used to fill lighters. Lighters were precious.

If a man brought an empty lighter, I would fill it; and he would give me a tin of food or a candle.

I was a paramedic. In these conditions, my knowledge was my wealth. Be curious and skilled. In these conditions, the ability to fix things is more valuable than gold.

Items and supplies will inevitably run out, but your skills will keep you fed.

I wish to say this: Learn to fix things, shoes or people.

My neighbor, for example, knew how to make kerosene for lamps. He never went hungry.

4. If you had three months to prepare now, what would you do?

Three months? Run away from the country? (joking)

Today, I know everything can collapse really fast. I have a stockpile of food, hygiene items, batteries — enough to last me for six months.

I live in a very secure flat and own a home with a shelter in a village 5 kilometers away. Another six-month supply there, too. That’s a small village; most people there are well-prepared. The war had taught them.

I have four weapons and 2,000 rounds for each.

I have a garden and have learned gardening. Also, I have a good instinct. You know, when everyone around you keeps telling you it’ll all be fine, but I know it will all collapse.

I have strength to do what I need to protect my family. Because when it all collapses, you must be ready to do “bad” things to keep your children alive and protect your family.

Surviving on your own is practically impossible. (That’s what I think.) Even you’re armed and ready, if you’re alone, you’ll die. I have seen that happen many times.

Families and groups, well-prepared, with skills and knowledge in various fields: That’s much better.

5. What should you stockpile?

That depends. If you plan to live by theft, all you need is weapons and ammo. Lots of ammo.

If not, more food, hygiene items, batteries, accumulators, little trading items (knives, lighters, flints, soap). Also, alcohol of a type that keeps well. The cheapest whiskey is a good trading item.

Many people died from insufficient hygiene. You’ll need simple items in great amounts. For example, garbage bags. Lots of them. And toilet papers. Non-reusable dishes and cups: You’ll need lots of them. I know that because we didn’t have any at all.

As for me, a supply of hygiene items is perhaps more important than food. You can shoot a pigeon. You can find a plant to eat. You can’t find or shoot any disinfectant.

Disinfectant, detergents, bleach, soap, gloves, masks.

First aid skills, washing wounds and burns. Perhaps you will find a doctor and will not be able to pay him.

Learn to use antibiotics. It’s good to have a stockpile of them.

You should choose the simplest weapons. I carry a Glock .45. I like it, but it’s a rare gun here. So I have two TT pistols, too. (Everyone has them and ammo is common.)

I don’t like Kalashnikov’s, but again, same story. Everyone has them; so do I.

You must own small, unnoticeable items. For example, a generator is good, but 1,000 BIC lighters are better. A generator will attract attention if there’s any trouble, but 1,000 lighters are compact, cheap and can always be traded.

We usually collected rainwater into four large barrels and then boiled it. There was a small river, but the water in it became very dirty very fast.

It’s also important to have containers for water: barrels and buckets.

6. Were gold and silver useful?

Yes. I personally traded all the gold in the house for ammunition.

Sometimes, we got our hands on money: dollars and Deutschmarks. We bought some things for them, but this was rare and prices were astronomical. For example, a can of beans cost $30 to $40. The local money quickly became worthless. Everything we needed we traded for through barter.

7. Was salt expensive?

Yes, but coffee and cigarettes were even more expensive. I had lots of alcohol and traded it without problems. Alcohol consumption grew over 10 times as compared to peacetime. Perhaps today, it’s more useful to keep a stock of cigarettes, lighters and batteries. They take up less space.

At this time, I was not a survivalist. We had no time to prepare — several days before the shit hit the fan. The politicians kept repeating over the TV that everything was going according to plan, there’s no reason to be concerned. When the sky fell on our heads, we took what we could.

8. Was it difficult to purchase firearms? What did you trade for arms and ammunition?

After the war, we had guns in every house. The police confiscated lots of guns at the beginning of the war. But most of them we hid. Now I have one legal gun that I have a license for. Under the law, that’s called a temporary collection. If there is unrest, the government will seize all the registered guns. Never forget that.

You know, there are many people who have one legal gun, but also illegal guns if that one gets seized. If you have good trade goods, you might be able to get a gun in a tough situation. But remember, the most difficult time is the first days, and perhaps you won’t have enough time to find a weapon to protect your family. To be disarmed in a time of chaos and panic is a bad idea.

In my case, there was a man who needed a car battery for his radio. He had shotguns. I traded the accumulator for both of them. Sometimes, I traded ammunition for food, and a few weeks later traded food for ammunition. Never did the trade at home, never in great amounts.

Few people knew how much and what I keep at home.

The most important thing is to keep as many things as possible in terms of space and money. Eventually, you’ll understand what is more valuable.

Correction: I’ll always value weapons and ammunition the most. Second? Maybe gas masks and filters.

9. What about security?

Our defenses were very primitive. Again, we weren’t ready, and we used what we could. The windows were shattered, and the roofs in a horrible state after the bombings. The windows were blocked — some with sandbags, others with rocks.

I blocked the fence gate with wreckage and garbage, and used a ladder to get across the wall. When I came home, I asked someone inside to pass over the ladder. We had a fellow on our street that completely barricaded himself in his house. He broke a hole in the wall, creating a passage for himself into the ruins of the neighbor’s house — a sort of secret entrance.

Maybe this would seem strange, but the most protected houses were looted and destroyed first. In my area of the city, there were beautiful houses with walls, dogs, alarms and barred windows. People attacked them first. Some held out; others didn’t. It all depended how many hands and guns they had inside.

I think defense is very important, but it must be carried out unobtrusively. If you are in a city and SHTF comes, you need a simple, non-flashy place, with lots of guns and ammo.

How much ammo? As much as possible.

Make your house as unattractive as you can.

Right now, I own a steel door, but that’s just against the first wave of chaos. After that passes, I will leave the city to rejoin a larger group of people, my friends and family.

There were some situations during the war. There’s no need for details, but we always had superior firepower and a brick wall on our side.

We also constantly kept someone watching the streets. Quality organization is paramount in case of gang attacks.

Shooting was constantly heard in the city.

Our perimeter was defended primitively. All the exits were barricaded and had little firing slits. Inside we had at least five family members ready for battle at any time and one man in the street, hidden in a shelter.

We stayed home through the day to avoid sniper fire.

At first, the weak perish. Then, the rest fight.

During the day, the streets were practically empty due to sniper fire. Defenses were oriented toward short-range combat alone. Many died if they went out to gather information, for example. It’s important to remember we had no information, no radio, no TV — only rumors and nothing else.

There was no organized army; every man fought. We had no choice. Everybody was armed, ready to defend themselves.

You should not wear quality items in the city; someone will murder you and take them. Don’t even carry a “pretty” long arm, it will attract attention.

Let me tell you something: If SHTF starts tomorrow, I’ll be humble. I’ll look like everyone else. Desperate, fearful. Maybe I’ll even shout and cry a little bit.

Pretty clothing is excluded altogether. I will not go out in my new tactical outfit to shout: “I have come! You’re doomed, bad guys!” No, I’ll stay aside, well-armed, well-prepared, waiting and evaluating my possibilities, with my best friend or brother.

Super-defenses, super-guns are meaningless. If people think they should steal your things, that you’re profitable, they will. It’s only a question of time and the amount of guns and hands.

10. How was the situation with toilets?

We used shovels and a patch of earth near the house. Does it seem dirty? It was. We washed with rainwater or in the river, but most of the time the latter was too dangerous. We had no toilet paper; and if we had any, I would have traded it away.

It was a “dirty” business.

Let me give you a piece of advice: You need guns and ammo first — and second, everything else. Literally everything! All depends on the space and money you have.

If you forget something, there will always be someone to trade with for it. But if you forget weapons and ammo, there will be no access to trading for you.

I don’t think big families are extra mouths. Big families means both more guns and strength — and from there, everyone prepares on his own.

11. How did people treat the sick and the injured?

Most injuries were from gunfire. Without a specialist and without equipment, if an injured man found a doctor somewhere, he had about a 30 percent chance of survival.

It ain’t the movie. People died. Many died from infections of superficial wounds. I had antibiotics for three to four uses — for the family, of course.

People died foolishly quite often. Simple diarrhea will kill you in a few days without medicine, with limited amounts of water.

There were many skin diseases and food poisonings… nothing to it.

Many used local plants and pure alcohol — enough for the short-term, but useless in the long term.

Hygiene is very important, as well as having as much medicine as possible — especially antibiotics.

Source: Silver Doctors

“There Is A Conspiracy”

The title of today’s column, “There Is A Conspiracy,” is a direct quote from Ezekiel 22:25. In this passage, God instructed Ezekiel to blow the whistle on the conspiracy of Israel’s prophets to deny people truth, to devour people’s souls, to defraud people’s substance, and to destroy people’s lives. I dare say this conspiracy is still alive and well today. Many pastors and religious leaders in 2013 America are as guilty of Ezekiel’s charges as were Israel’s ancient prophets.

However, use the word “conspiracy” today and even most Christians will roll their eyes in disbelief. And, of course, the mainstream media is so paranoid of the word conspiracy that one has to speculate that the reason for this aversion to objectively dealing with the subject is simply due to the fact that they are among the co-conspirators.

But once in awhile, someone in the media has the guts to broach the subject of conspiracy. My friends at TruthAlliance.net recently covered a report written by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine. Taibbi begins his report saying, “Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.”

Speaking of the LIBOR and other Wall Street scandals, Taibbi goes on to write, “All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings–in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP–are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

“If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati–this is the real thing, and it’s no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.”

See the report at:

Truth Alliance

Hallelujah! Just about everybody with an IQ over 80 knew it; so it’s about time someone finally said it: gold and silver prices are “rigged.” So is the Petro-Dollar. So is the ammo shortage. So are the headlines on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. And so are many of our national catastrophes.

Back in 2011, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was added to the list of “conspiracy nuts” when tapes that were recorded within months of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which had been sealed in a vault at the Kennedy Library in Boston, were released. In the tapes, former First Lady Jackie Kennedy revealed that she believed Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and other “influential individuals” orchestrated the Dallas shooting that killed her husband.

Wow! Jackie Kennedy didn’t believe the official government story that her husband was killed by a “lone gunman.” She believed there was a conspiracy of “influential individuals” who colluded in killing her husband.

I’m with Jackie! Even though I was only a little boy when President Kennedy was assassinated, I could never wrap my head around the “lone gunman” theory. And the older I got, and the more I studied that tragedy, the more I became convinced there was a giant conspiracy involved in both killing the President and covering it up after he had been killed. I still believe that today.

While we are talking about conspiracies, let’s talk about a few more.

TWA Flight 800 “Explosion”

Do you really believe the official story of the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996? What if an American missile accidentally shot down that jetliner? Do you really think the federal government would come clean about it?

Read this report from The Washington Weekly, if you are willing to be enlightened:

TWA

Oklahoma City Bombing

Do readers really believe the official story that Timothy McVeigh acted alone in igniting the explosion that took down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and that there was no cover-up as to what actually happened? I don’t.

Here is where you can get started on this one:

OKC Bombing

And here:

OK State Representative Charles Key States His Case

9/11 Twin Towers and Pentagon Attacks

There has been so much written on this subject, I will let readers fend for themselves as to personal research on the matter. Without wading too deeply into this discussion (and for the sake of column space), let me ask just one simple question. Pray tell, what took down Building 7? To this good hour, I have not heard one single plausible explanation proffered by any government or media representative that explains why Building 7 collapsed.

Do I know what really happened on 9/11? No. But do I believe that the government is purposefully keeping the American people in the dark as to what really happened on 9/11/01? You bet I do! Do I believe that there is a cover-up of crucial evidence related to 9/11 by both the federal government and the national news media? You bet I do!

Haiti Earthquake

Another event that the official version is just completely unbelievable to me is the earthquake in Haiti in January of 2010. I will always believe that there was so much to this story that we were not being told. It didn’t “smell” right to me when it happened; it doesn’t “smell” right to me now. If you’re interested, try perusing through some of this information:

Haiti

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria Wars

Let me be so blunt as to say I don’t believe the official story about any of the wars America is waging in the Middle East. I believe virtually every reason George W. Bush gave the American people for attacking and invading Iraq was a premeditated, bald-faced lie! And I believe every reason Barack Obama gives for staying at war in the Middle East is a premeditated bald-faced lie!

I believe the so-called “War on Terror” which justifies endless wars abroad and endless surveillance at home is completely manufactured by those in government and business for personal economic and political interests. In the name of fighting for freedom overseas, the central government in Washington, D.C., is turning America’s homeland into a giant prison-camp. Pray tell, what good does it do to send American troops overseas to fight a war for freedom, then turn around and use the war for freedom overseas as an excuse to expunge the freedoms of the American people here at home? If that doesn’t smell of conspiracy, nothing does!

Ron Paul was right! “Blowback” truly is a reality; and America’s “War on Terror” is actually making the United States less safe, not more. In fact, if you really want to get sick to your stomach over what this so-called “War on Terror” is accomplishing and why so many people around the world are coming to hate us, take a look at this report:

The Pentagon’s New Power Elite: A Secret War in 120 Countries

The Boston Bombings

Noted researcher and analyst, Joel Skousen, recently wrote a detailed and lengthy exposé on the Boston Bombings in his excellent World Affairs Brief (which I highly recommend). Here is just a short clip:

“It seems very suspicious that the FBI would release so many photos and video excerpts (including even partial and grainy shots as if they are presenting everything possible) showing the brothers [accused bombers] in the area, but then they fail to produce the most conclusive evidence that matches what the indictment says.

“This narrative is so specific that it would be very risky for a federal official to make such detailed reference to video evidence if they did not actually possess it–unless they already had a legal strategy worked out where the claimed evidence would be suppressed under the government’s habitual use of the State Secrets doctrine or via a compliant judge who has agreed in advance to seal the evidence. The suppression of key evidence has been a central part of every major government cover-up including the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, Oklahoma City bombing and both WTC attacks.”

To subscribe to Skousen’s World Affairs Brief, go to:

World Affairs Brief

Skousen is right to be suspicious. Agencies of the federal government have long-facilitated terrorist plots in this country. Even the New York Times carried an editorial outlining a long list of examples of how the FBI hatches and then “discovers” terrorist plots.

See the Times editorial at:

Terrorist Plots Helped Along By The FBI

Furthermore, writing for Infowars.com, Paul Joseph Watson chronicles the long-established pattern of central governments in creating national terror as a vehicle with which to blame other groups and set in motion whatever predetermined plan had been previously concocted.

See Watson’s report at:

Why Government Should Be The First Suspect In Any Terror Attack

The Connecticut School Shootings, The Colorado Theater Shootings, etc.

There are so many inconsistencies, changed stories, and conflicting reports with virtually every official report regarding these mass shootings, so much so that it is difficult for any rationally thinking person to believe them. Unfortunately, the absence of true objective investigative reporting by the national news media means the vast majority of the American people will never have the information they need and, thus, they will never know the truth about any of these mass shootings. All the news media does today is simply regurgitate the official government story, without question. (That’s why, if you truly want to be informed, you must abandon the controlled propaganda press corps and research independent sources. But even there, one must be careful. Not every independent source is reliable. Plus, government propagandists are at work planting bogus information on the Internet and elsewhere in an attempt to make government critics appear foolish.) But there is one constant that surrounds every mass shooting: the push for increased gun control by anti-freedom politicians. Yes, I realize we could put this under the “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” (Rahm Emanuel) category. But I’m so cynical now that I’m seeing the potential for the dark side of government behind every mass shooting.

Speaking of defending the Second Amendment, there is a brand new film being produced entitled, MOLON LABE: How The Second Amendment Guarantees America’s Freedom, based on the masterful research of attorney Edwin Vieira, Jr., in his book, The Sword and Sovereignty. The film features people such as Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Larry Pratt, G. Edward Griffin, Alex Jones, Stewart Rhodes, and yours truly. This film has the potential to be a “game-changer” in the attacks against the preservation of our right to keep and bear arms. Acclaimed producer James Jaeger is nearing final editing and could really use the support of thousands of freedomists around the country. Your contributions to this project could pay off mightily in helping to preserve the Second Amendment. I highly encourage readers to seriously consider donating to the completion of this terrific film. It is a film that Barack Obama and Dianne Feinstein hope will never be seen. Here is the trailer along with information on how you can contribute:

MOLON LABE Official Trailer

So, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone Magazine, the late Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and the Prophet Ezekiel all agree: “There is a conspiracy.” I believe it.

Joe Biden: No Reason To Ban AR-15s

Okay, half-slow laughin’ Joe didn’t actually say that, but he might as well have. While defending his position this past Thursday that banning the rifles incorrectly called “assault weapons” won’t negatively impact upon Americans’ safety, he pointed out that you shouldn’t trouble yourself: shotguns would still be available — and they’re more effective, anyway. He said, reports the Daily Caller:

A shotgun will keep you a lot safer — a double-barreled shotgun — than an assault weapon in somebody’s hand who doesn’t know how to use it, even one who does know how to use it. You know, it’s harder to use an assault weapon to hit something than it is a shotgun.

[…]You want to keep people away in an earthquake? Buy some shotgun shells.

Alright, Joe; if you’re talking about close-quarters self-defense, you’ll get no argument from me. Now, would you again explain why you want to ban AR-15s?

I mean, if they’re so relatively ineffective, if it’s so hard to hit a target with one, why are you worried about getting them off the street? What, do you want to put more effective guns in criminals’ hands?

And if shotguns are so devastating — so much more formidable than those dreaded assault weapons (that aren’t) — shouldn’t you endeavor to ban them? Of course, this is on the agenda; as Dianne Crimestein once admitted, if she had her way, all guns would be confiscated (except, presumably, the one she owns).

And I can see it now. Let’s say that the anti-Second Amendment folks succeeded in banning assault weapons (that aren’t). When another incident such as the Aurora, Colorado massacre occurs — where most of the wounds were inflicted with a shotgun —the media will actually report it accurately. You see, there’ll no longer be a reason to lie and place the onus on the AR-15 because it will already be illegal, and the reportage will go something like this: “Experts point out that a shotgun is actually more devastating in close-quarters attacks on soft targets than AR-15s and AK-47s — which are already illegal.” And the statist politicians will say, perhaps, “It’s a hole in the legislation that ‘assault weapons’ were criminalized while far more dangerous shotguns were left on the streets. Obviously, if these hand cannons are more devastating than an AR-15, they’re assault weapons, too. And we must take action immediately.” That’s exactly how our assault liberals might play it.

As of now, though, you can still own a gun that is so much more dangerous than an assault weapon (that isn’t). In fact, Vice President Biden endorses it. And thank you, Uncle Joe, for explaining firearm facts of life to America. I’m so glad you’re on our side.

Global Economic Slowdown Signals Sad New Year

The markets, as most people reading this should now well know, no longer reflect in any way the true economic health of our country.  If one was to measure the financial “recovery” of this nation by the strength of global stocks alone, he would probably come to the conclusion that the collapse of 2008 was a mere hiccup in the overall success of the worldwide economic system.  However, electronically traded equities with little more to back their value than scraps of receipt paper and numbers on a screen have no bearing on what is going to happen to you, and to me, over the course of the coming year.  The stock market is a sideshow, a popcorn movie, a façade.  The real drama is going on behind the scenes and revealed in fundamentals that mainstream analysts no longer discuss…

The only advantage of a long drawn disintegration of the overall system is that as the years pass, it becomes possible to discover a pattern through which we can gauge where we really stand today and will stand tomorrow, giving us a chance (a narrow chance) to limit the eventual damage.  Unfortunately, the pattern now in motion suggests that the next year will be exactly what we have been predicting over the past several months:  Dismal.

The MSM refuses to discuss it at great length, but all signs show an epic global slowdown in demand and production, especially in the final quarter of 2012.  This slowdown cannot be denied, nor can it be shrugged off as inconsequential.  This development is exactly as I predicted in January of this year using the Baltic Dry Index as a guide.  During that first quarter, the BDI fell to record lows, indicating an extreme decline in shipping demand around the world, which, in turn, indicated a fall in demand for raw goods, which, in turn, indicated a fall in demand for consumer goods.  Mainstream pundits sought to distract the public from this fact by claiming that the BDI was collapsing due to an “oversupply of ships”, not rescinding demand.  This disinformation was proven incorrect in the beginning of the third quarter of this year, when export nations from China, to Japan, to Germany all began reporting abysmal manufacturing numbers and steep faltering in overseas purchases.

Of course, we all know what happened next:  The markets began to tank when they caught the scent of a slowdown, losing a thousand points within the span of a week.  Not so unpredictably (since I also predicted it at the beginning of the year) the Federal Reserve leapt into action with its announcement of QE3 (QE Infinity).

QE3 has done little to change the problem of falling global demand, but it has certainly defibrillated stocks.  In fact, I think it is safe to say that a majority of QE fiat funds are flowing (directly or indirectly) into the DOW, and not much else.  International trade and consumption is starting to feel the pain, and respective countries are no longer able to hide it.  Keep in mind that this slowdown is occurring right at the height of the Christmas season, when consumption is usually supposed to reignite.

Despite the sugar coated claims of insane Keynesians who only a few years ago were predicting a “resurgence” of American industry and exports due to the Federal Reserve’s ongoing devaluation of the dollar, production in the U.S. has remained pathetically weak, and continues to decline:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/business/economy/decline-in-exports-hurts-us-trade-deficit.html

This is of course a direct result of slowing global demand, reducing potential markets all over the world, which is something deflation fear mongers apparently didn’t see coming.  The reality is that demand is faltering EVERYWHERE, not just in the U.S., and this begs a particular question:  In an interdependent economic system driven primarily by consumption, who is going to fill the void when all nations are dry of spending cash?  That is to say, who is going to take up the slack, when obviously no one has the wealth to do so?  Without a cultural cash engine, the globalized framework is destined to fail.

China’s export growth fell far more than expected in November, something which many Chinese economists are attributing to a complete lack of revival in American markets:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/10/us-china-economy-idUSBRE8B80FL20121210

Manufacturing in the UK went into steep decline almost simultaneously, showing that sinking demand is striking both the Pacific and the Atlantic:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-07/u-k-manufacturing-drops-more-than-forecast-on-food-alcohol-1-.html

Germany, the largest economy in the EU and the only country still holding the absurd political entity together, has been shocked to discover that its own Bundesbank is forecasting a contraction in growth to near zero in 2013:

http://www.actionforex.com/analysis/daily-forex-fundamentals/germany%27s-bundesbank-revise-lower-2013-outlook-20121207180090/

Japan’s economy suffered an annualized decline in GDP in November greater than that which occurred during the Fukushima disaster:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-11/japan-s-economy-shrinks-at-fastest-pace-since-earthquake.html

This contraction has recently caused Japan to install a new revamped government during elections this month, which unfortunately will be instituting almost identical policies to the last regime.

Finally, Brazil, a developing export nation with very important significance as a litmus test for world consumption, posted near zero growth in the third quarter of 2012, far below expectations but in line with the bigger picture.  The global financial machine is grinding to a halt right under our very noses…

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/30/us-brazil-economy-gdp-idUSBRE8AT0KM20121130

At the end of 2012, it is undeniable; the system is running out of steam, and not even constant fiat injections by central banks are reversing our current course.

In order to understand what is happening, I want you to imagine a quickly diminishing cycle.  Imagine that in 2008, America was on the edge of a whirlpool, or a spinning vortex, and was suddenly caught in the outermost current.  Today, we have circled the epicenter several times, each rotation becoming smaller and more volatile than the last.  Eventually, the whirlpool will reach an end, and our economy will be sucked into the destructive funnel.  One can see clear evidence of this decline in the Baltic Dry Index:

Notice how each year since 2008 there is a spike in shipping rates indicating a rise in demand for materials at the onset of the Christmas season, which is the natural progression of things.  Yet, also notice that this spike in demand grows smaller with each passing year.  In 2012, the increase has been almost nonexistent, meaning that we are likely very close to going down the drain.

Some pundits may argue that November’s Black Friday sales were tremendous, and this signals a recovery in spending and consumption.  I would point out that such numbers are deceiving.  High sales during the most discounted day of the Christmas buying season is not necessarily a good thing.  What it really reveals is that a majority of shoppers were looking for the lowest prices possible because of a lack of personal savings.  It is a sign of desperation, not revitalization.  Full season numbers have not yet been released, but when they are, I believe we will see a fantastic spike in sales on Black Friday followed by a complete flatline for the rest of the year.  Obviously high consumption has not been sustained, otherwise, worldwide manufacturing and shipping would be in much better shape.

The issue here is one of priorities.  With multiplying distractions going on around the globe, including the fear of recent mass murders at home, will the public be able to keep track of the deadly financial tidal waves just off the coast, or will they even care when distracted by so many sharks in the water?  The next two months will be very revealing.  The so-called “fiscal cliff” is on the way, and the question of whether or not the U.S. government should kick the can down the road or take the sour medicine it needs and move on has arisen once again.  This debate is and always has been an illusion.  Whether we continue to increase government spending, taxation, and inflation, or we cut all spending and shut down the fiat presses, there is still going to be a collapse.

However, the “fiscal cliff” could be very dangerous in an entirely different respect…

The coming collapse will not be due to the indecision or partisan bickering of our politicians.  They are in much closer agreement than the MSM would like to admit.  Instead, the monolithic Catch-22 of our age will be the direct result of the actions of the private Federal Reserve and the peripheral international banking cartel; the engineers who gave birth to the toxic derivatives implosion in the first place.  What I fear most is that the results of the fiscal cliff negotiation along with other triggers around the planet (Syria, Iran, the EU breakdown, etc.) will be used to veil the true weaknesses of our already imploding system, and eventually be exploited as scapegoat events for a disaster that has been in the making for decades, not just a few years.  The omens are not good for 2013, and we can only circle the drain for so long.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

Preppers Who Make Surviving The Apocalypse Even Less Fun

Being forced to endure and survive a catastrophic macro event like a monetary or social collapse is perhaps one of the worst experiences I could imagine.  Such a crisis leads to just about every crime and inhuman action in existence, and, the time required for a culture to right itself and rebuild is severely protracted.  A hurricane or earthquake or tidal wave; these calamities are short lived and easy in comparison.  The point is, as survivalists who are preparing to make an economic end-game scenario as “comfortable” to live through as we can, it is incumbent upon us to consider the kind of company we keep during the gambit.  Some allies will make that mad world bearable; others will bring the madness to your doorstep

Many preppers are aware of the dangers inherent in our progressively deteriorating nation.  Unfortunately, some of them are completely unaware of the dangers inherent within themselves.  Building a solid community of people to rely on during a collapse is absolutely essential, and the larger the group of liberty minded neighbors the better.  But, if certain ground rules are not established from the very beginning, a rainbow of personal issues and character flaws could very well destroy years of effort.  Care must be taken by all parties involved to ensure that internal conflicts remain at a minimum, and when they do arise, that each person is wise enough to resolve issues in an adult manner.

I hate to say it, but you will inevitably run into some folks that are beyond compromise and beyond hope.  Working with them is like pulling teeth…shark’s teeth…from your jugular.  Here are just a handful of powder keg personalities that will make the apocalypse more than a living hell for you and your friends if they manage to latch onto or take leadership in your survival watch…

1) The Self Assumed “Leader”

The “Assumed Leader” is not actually a reliable or practical leader; he just thinks he is, and reminds everyone loudly whenever he can find occasion.  He does not generally do this by screaming “I AM YOUR LEADER!”  Instead, he attempts to micro-manage every aspect of the survival group and shows early signs of control issues.  The Assumed Leader will first make forceful suggestions to test the waters, scoffing angrily whenever people do not strictly follow his advice.  If he gains traction, his suggestions turn into orders, and he begins to act as though he is somehow in a superior position to the rest of the community.

He seems to have an answer to every question or concern, which would be nice if he actually knew what he as talking about half of the time.  Usually, this is not the case.  He may have expertise in a certain field, like farming, or building, or engineering, or even defense, and this is indeed valuable.  However, his mastery of one area of knowledge has inflated his ego to massive proportions and he now pretends as if he is some kind of hyper-educated elitist potentate.  When approached with alternative options and methods, he will respond with ridicule as if you have no clue what you are talking about.  When his ideas are criticized, he will react with fury, and try to remove dissenters from the community entirely.

The best way to avoid these people is to discover them early in your prepping project, and to make certain that NO ONE becomes a De facto dictator.  Every person with particular expertise within the community should be given respect in that specific field, but not given authority over all decisions.  The experienced farmer should offer leadership when it comes to farming, but step aside when it comes to defense and defenders, and vice versa.  It is best to keep in mind that the most effective leaders always ask those around them for aid and advice before coming to any conclusion.  The worst leaders already assume they know everything.

2) The Feudal Lord

The Feudal Lord is an Assumed Leader who has managed to lure other preppers into a Commune, rather than a Community, and there is a considerable difference.  He is often a well-off survivalist who has suddenly realized that for all his money and land and supplies, he is basically defenseless, and needs an organized group to protect his bounty.  He entices other preppers into the fold with ideas that he is building a legitimate and fair community, and with land already available, many take interest.  The problem is, the Feudal Lord believes possession of the land that the group is defending automatically makes him Grand Poobah, and that those people are not equals, but servants and serfs.

I have found that Feudal Lords also have a tendency to charge people “fees” for the right to join their communes.  They will argue that this is designed to “vet” candidates and see if they are truly “serious” about survival prepping.  In the dark corner of their minds, however, they actually believe that they are OWED a tithe from anyone who wishes to earn the “privilege” of becoming a permanent installment on their property.  From the very beginning they go into the project with almost no sincere regard for the people they are working with.

The reality is, the Feudal Lord’s land and supplies are utterly meaningless without security and without aid.  His survival riches can be taken in an instant by a mere handful of looters, or even one experienced raider.  Without other people, treated as equals in survival and ready to lay down their lives to protect each other and him, he has nothing, and is foolhardy to think otherwise.

This is not to say that all landowners who try to centralize a group on their property are seeking to become mini-kings of a mini-kingdom.  If rules and agreements are made early on, and everyone understands their role, then such an arrangement could work.  But, if the landowner purposely avoids set agreements, appoints roles to people without asking them, changes the plan regularly to suit himself, and tries to leech money out of participants, then it’s time to walk away now before it is too late.  Eventually he WILL use his position as landowner as a means to dominate, and will threaten to cast people out who disagree with his methods.

The best way to avoid these characters and the commune situation altogether is to not centralize on a single piece of land, but to organize in a neighborhood fashion, where everyone maintains sovereign control of what they do and all aid is voluntary.

3) The Moral Relativist

There is, sadly, a small subsection of survivalists out there who do not plan to live off their own preps; they plan to confiscate the preps of others by force and solve every problem at the barrel of a gun.  In their mind, a crisis situation calls for the abandonment of conscience and the application of a “survival of the fittest” mentality.  They believe that morals are all well and good when civilized society remains, but a source of weakness during catastrophe.  Their philosophy is: Only the strongest of men will be able to set aside principle and “do what needs to be done”.  That is to say, they believe you must become the monster to defeat the monster.

In fact, only men who are able to hold onto their principles during the worst moments are strong.  Weak men run away from conscience, using the excuse that times are “different and difficult”.  They are not survivalists, they are terrorists in every sense, and they will only hurt our ultimate goal of rebuilding a free, prosperous, and individualistic society.

These people should be avoided like the plague.  They will make enemies wherever they go, ask you to do highly questionable things, and push your community into annihilation.  Eventually, somebody is going to put them out of their misery, and it’s best to not be around when that happens.

4) The Obsessive

The Obsessive is a person whose drive is initially impressive but also ultimately destructive.  His entire life revolves around survival prepping and impending doom.  Certainly, it is better to be extra concerned about the economic crisis on the horizon than to be utterly oblivious.  A smart man over-prepares.  But, there is such a thing as overkill, even in the world of survivalism.

No one can ever do enough fast enough in this person’s eyes.  He will whine constantly about how he is the only one taking preparations seriously, and how everyone else is a lazy bum.  He will become frantic on a daily basis, admonishing the group or community on their lack of urgency.  In a leadership position, this person is a nightmare, creating constant waves of tension and panic, instead of calmly offering solutions or constructive criticism.

Obsessives are generally unimaginative people with little talent or intelligence who use their prepping lifestyle as their only means to feel superior to others.  They tend to become legends in their own minds, dreaming of the day when everyone will desperately cling to them and their remedial survival know-how.  They fantasize about all the people who “wouldn’t take their advice” (usually smug advice), crawling in squalor begging them for help one day.

The Obsessive’s motto is:  “Let me tell you why you are wrong and how you are lazy!”  Instead of: “How can I help you fix this?”

We all need a break once in a while from the horrors we know are waiting for us.  To step back and enjoy what we can of a beautiful day or good friends is not the same as being a freeloader or a backslider within your prepper group.  Survival is about more than sustaining the body.  It is about more than chopping wood, stockpiling ammo, and slaving over a piece of land from sun up until sundown like a mindless drone just to get by; it is also about sustaining the heart and the mind.  Otherwise, what is the point of living?

5) The Ulterior Motive Drama Queen 

The Drama Queen is a man or woman who is loosely interested in survivalism, but wants to join your community for other reasons, and these reasons may cause many members dismay.  The opposite of The Obsessive, you’ll notice a strange non-involvement on their part or lack of interest as far as participating in survival discussions and decision making.  They will often hand over all their survival preparation plans to another person or persons, while hovering like a gnat around the community searching for that special something.

They may be looking for friends and social recognition.  They may be afraid of collapse and simply trying to lock into ANY group regardless of whether they fit, becoming disenchanted later.  They may enjoy the excitement of feeling like they are involved, and are living vicariously through the accomplishments of others.  They may just be looking for a date.  Ultimately, their primary objective is not to build a working community, but to get something out of the community beyond safety.

If they do not get what they want, they raise hell, using whatever excuse happens to be handy without ever admitting their real motivations.  They will deliberately start unnecessary drama, attempt to create divisions, focus on one person as the cause of all their troubles, or blame the whole group for the heartache in their life.  They will attempt to draw everyone into their personal soap opera in the hopes of becoming the focal point, sharing strange and extremely private issues with anyone who accidentally offers to listen.

Eventually, they will be seen for what they are and will lose the ear of the other preppers, who obviously have better things to worry about, but not after wreaking some havoc in the process.

6) The Zealot 

The Zealot has a perfect picture in his mind of how his survival community is going to look.  Absolutely perfect.  The problem is, all people are imperfect and all have different conceptions of life, and this disturbs and disrupts the Zealot’s fantasy.  It is one thing to be careful in whom you associate with when assembling a prepper organization, but it is entirely another to hold everyone to insane standards that even you cannot meet.

The Zealot usually wants to be in charge so that he can vet and control each member of the group, but this is not always the case.  Zealots are also sometimes highly anti-social, showing interest in a group for a short time and then suddenly walking away as if no one is up to par.  He may base his zealotry on a misplaced religious fervor or philosophical inflexibility, but he will not be happy until everyone sees the world the way he does, or until they meet his grandiose brand of moral flawlessness.  For him, it is not enough that the community around him shares a love for liberty and a disdain for tyranny, they must also be “spiritually pure” in his eyes.

One mistake or disagreement by a member of the group earns them a black mark on the Zealot’s list which he never forgets.  From then on, that member is the enemy, and the Zealot will engineer conflict after conflict until the person gives up and goes away, or until he can convince the group that person is more trouble than they are worth.

The great dilemma for any survivalist is to balance personal freedom and a peaceful home life with the reality that they will not last long without relying on a group.  Other people bring talent, friendship, and safety to our lives, but they also bring baggage.  The key is to work with those who know how to manage as much of their own baggage as possible, who are aware of themselves and are willing to police their own quirks, and who have not swan dived off a cliff into extreme disturbia.  No survival community can withstand the savage assault of national collapse otherwise.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

A Tale of Two Disasters: The Balkans and the Middle East

Yesterday and today (October 14-15) I’ve been taking part in an interesting conference at the Patriarchate of Peć, in the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo. Organized by Bishop Jovan (Ćulibrk), an old friend of Dr. Fleming’s and mine, The Balkans and the Middle East Mirroring Each Other marks the centenary of the First Balkan War and the liberation of Kosovo and Southern Serbia after four centuries of the Ottoman misrule.

The conference has brought together an eclectic group of scholars: Ambassador Darko Tanasković of the University of Belgrade, Boris Havel of the University of Zagreb, Col. Shaul Shay of BESA Center for Strategic Studies, Martin van Creveld of Tel Aviv University, Gordon Bardos of Columbia University, and myself. The proceedings were attended by Patriarch Iriney of the Serbian Orthodox Church (R) and an array of Western diplomats and military officers based in Kosovo.

On the first day Professor van Creveld caused some controversy by suggesting that there existed a significant parallel between Israel and Serbia. The former needs to give up all occupied territories, including most of East Jerusalem—he argued—just as the latter needs to give up its claim to Kosovo. Regardless of how attached both nations feel to their ancient shrines and monuments that would be left behind, van Creveld argued that “amputating the gangrenous leg” was the only way to halt the sapping of strength and resources with no end-game in sight.

Disputing van Creveld’s diagnosis, Dr. Shay said that the apt metaphor was not an amputable leg but the patient’s heart that cannot be removed without killing the patient. My own paper reflected a similar point of view. The similarities between Kosovo and the West Bank are not obvious to the uninitiated, and prima facie similarities may appear superficial: In both cases there’s a small piece of disputed real estate, rich in history, poor in everything else, and badly mismanaged by the local Muslim majority which is chronically hostile to its non-Muslim neighbors. In both cases that majority craves internationally-recognized statehood. Far more important, in my view, is the spiritual parallel, with which I closed my remarks:

Proponents of Kosovo independence scoff at the Serbs’ claim that Kosovo, with its many ancient monasteries and the site of the famous battle, represents not just any part of their country but its very heart and soul—“Serbia’s Jerusalem.” Such attitude betrays a cynical contempt for the essence of any true nation’s identity, which necessarily rests on its historical, moral and spiritual roots. Without such foundation a people ceases to be a people and becomes but a random mob. If Serbia can be haughtily deprived of her Jerusalem today, and her historical and spiritual claims are dismissed out of hand, who is to say “al-Quds” will not be demanded of Israel tomorrow as the capital of an independent Palestine? And is it not hypocritical of the United States to actively support the former while claiming to be opposed to the latter?

Turkey is the common denominator in the Balkans and the Middle East, and its return to the center stage as a regional power is a remarkable phenomenon. It is historically unprecedented for a former great power which undergoes a period of steep decline to make a comeback and reestablish its position as a major player. After the Peloponnesian War Athens was finished for all time. Following the collapse of the Western Empire, Rome has never regained its old stature and glory. After Philip II Spain declined precipitously and has remained a third-rate power ever since. The list goes on, yet Turkey appears to be an exception to the rule.

Turkey’s neo-Ottoman strategy was the theme of Professor Tanasković’s presentation. He noted that at different times and in different contexts Turkey presents itself as a Mediterranean, Balkan, Middle Eastern, or NATO country, but that its most important, indeed defining feature is its Islamic character. Both the Balkans and the Middle East have been repeatedly singled out and openly named as priorities in the neo-Ottoman strategy of “Strategic Depth” as articulated by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. The ultimate goal is to recreate a sphere of strictly Turkish dominance, according to Professor Tanasković. He insists that the AKP government’s neo-Ottoman strategy is not an ideological projection focused on the past. Quite the contrary, it is a constant feature of Turkish foreign policy—logical and legitimate. The Islamists are rediscovering their heritage which was interrupted by the Kemalist revolution. Neo-Ottomanism is neither good nor bad, it is a reality  based on the notion that parallel to globalization, we have macro-regionalization of the world. In reality, Tanasković went on, there is no “globalization” in world politics: in a sense we are still in the 19th century, with regional powers seeking to dominance in their zones of influence. Only the US is still hoping to transcend the spatial limitations by projecting power always and everywhere.

Professor Tanaskovic concluded by saying that Turkey may have overplayed her hand following Ankara’s decision last spring to support the uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. That decision has changed the strategic equation in the region, and it now exposes Turkey to the possibility of both Russia and Iran coming to view it as an adversary.

Shaul Shay opened his presentation by saying that the term “Arab Spring” is flawed. The word “tsunami,” or perhaps “earthquake,” would be more appropriate. It was destructive, unexpected, and not significantly amenable to human intervention. Nothing significant enough had happened in 2010 to enable us to say that this was the trigger for what followed. In the end, Shay argued, the Islamic Evolution proved stronger than the Tweeter Revolution. The process launched by young activists using all the resources the Internet has to offer eventually paved the way for Islamist movements.  The main actors for change have been the youth, but the beneficiaries have been the Islamists—they were structured, with deep roots in society, unlike the youth who have not had time to organize. The outcomes of recent Arab uprisings have confirmed the organizational superiority and appeal of Islamist political parties in a number of countries in the Middle East. The fragile transitions from secular pro-Western dictatorships through a “democratic procedure” to the formation of Islamic regimes was a “tsunami” which has moved the tectonic plates of the Muslim societies and will provoke aftershocks that will lead to a region dominated by political Islam.

In recent years, Say concluded, we’ve seen a change in strategy used by radical Islamic organizations. Muslim Brotherhood openly seeks to establish “democracy” based upon Islamic principles. They regard liberal democracy with contempt, but they are willing to accommodate it as an avenue to power but as an avenue that runs only one way.

Historic changes taking place in both the Balkans and the Middle East are the political equivalent to the shift of tectonic plates. This is a crossroad in history and the road the nations involved take will determine our future. In the meantime we might see more Islamization there rather than Western style democracies. Where it will really lead Middle East and the rest of the world only future will tell.

How “Crazy Survivalists” Make The World A Better Place

I was recently interviewed by a journalist for a local newspaper who was developing a story on the exponential rise of the “prepper lifestyle” in America, most especially in Western Montana.  Being an outsider to the Liberty Movement, she was naturally curious as to what motivated us to make what some in our culture would see as a drastic and bewildering leap away from the mainstream.  She was equally fascinated with our willingness to travel great distances and make substantial sacrifices to live in regions like the American Redoubt.

I will not deny, Montana has indeed become a “hotbed” of survivalism and Constitutionalism, or what the Southern Poverty Law Center would call “extremism and domestic terrorism”.  I lived in Pittsburgh for years while writing for Neithercorp and Alt-Market and rarely ran into like minded individuals aware of the tenuous status of our society.  Within days of moving to Montana, I was being recognized by complete strangers in supermarkets excited to discuss the inner workings of Keynesian monetary corruption, precious metals investment, and Alinsky disinformation tactics.  Yeah…I know…it’s weird.

After living for a while in the Redoubt, you begin to forget that there are still many people in this country that are utterly oblivious to the epic dangers around them, as well as painfully helpless in knowing what to do when those dangers land on their doorsteps.  Speaking with the newspaper reporter, and my experiences at Paulfest in Tampa, Florida, reminded me that the world has yet to be reminded of the value of survivalism.  There is still a gap, a disconnect, a psychological twitch of the masses, and it compels me to explain, yet again, what they are missing.

I had thought about using parables like the ancient Greek story of Cassandra, who was given the gift of foresight and prophecy, but also stricken with a curse which prevented anyone from believing her dire warnings.  Or the story of Noah, who was given an omen, a vision of catastrophe, and directed by God on how to save a remnant of life, while knowing that most of the people around him would perish.  And what about Galileo, who simply tried to point out the scientific operations of the universe in which we exist, only to be ostracized by his church and government?  In these modern times, however, many find it increasingly difficult to relate to mythology, bible lore, or even historical precedence.  Luckily, there is always cinema…

While considering this topic, as if by design, I stumbled upon the film ‘Take Shelter’, the story of a man who suffers from acute intuition.  His vivid dreams warn him of a nightmare event, but is he a prophet, or a schizophrenic with delusions of doom?

Human beings hold within them a natural mechanism, a moral dynamo that compels them to alert others to the dangers they see silhouette on the horizon.  Every survivalist today has at one time or another felt the overwhelming weight of responsibility that comes with knowing; not believing, but KNOWING the future.  The film ‘Take Shelter’ illustrates the internal and external dilemmas of the survivalist in a way that is striking, beautiful, and affirming.

Prophetic dreams and spoken messages from the heavens are not necessarily required to understand the dilemmas our nation faces in the new millennium.  It does not take a psychic to see the mathematical certainty of dollar devaluation and loss of world reserve status.  The degradation of our civil liberties in the name of state security.  The formation of unaccountable supranational bodies which are quickly encroaching upon our individual sovereignty.  In fact, a person would have to be mentally blind, deaf, and dumb to NOT grasp what is happening right under their noses.  Sadly, this is where a majority of the American populace lives.

Even at Paulfest, a convention and congregation of what I consider some of the most awake and socially aware people on the planet, I discovered that at least half of those in attendance had a minimal sense of urgency as far as a true national crisis was concerned, clinging to the assumption that they had yet more time to stab at top down solutions and political tap dancing that continually falls short of what is necessary to restore liberty.

It is difficult to retain one’s composure in the face of the astounding absurdity of normalcy bias.  The idea that today’s comforts will continue on tomorrow and forever is a powerful one.  To break such apathy requires steadfast resolve.  Sometimes, only startling and terrifying events are enough to rattle the mindless masses.  Sometimes, you just have to let the chips fall where they may, speak the truth to the best of your ability, and let the herd sort out the rest in their own good time, whatever there is left of it.  What we see as a forgone conclusion, what we passionately fight to expose, in their minds often translates into belligerence and a frightening subversion of their joyous naivety:

As we invade their perfect world with the dreadful facts of life, their subconscious reflex is to regard us as a tangible threat.  The first reaction is always to laugh.  Ridicule without substance is the primary defense of the ignorant.  But, what if you don’t go away?  What if your arguments are too precise?  What if there is too much clarity to your position?  What if you have a whole movement of people behind you?  What if you are a force to be reckoned with, and cannot be refuted or dissuaded?  What if logic dictates the admission that you are right, and they are wrong?

Then arises fury…

It is not uncommon for the truth tellers of an era to be labeled the enemies of society.  To be held as criminals, traitors, and terrorists.  In fact, the establishment has in the past two decades made every effort to paint survivalists as the boogeymen of our age; unstable and unpredictable wild-men hell bent on destruction in the name of some hallucinatory ideology.  Using generalizations, false associations, and outright lies, corrupt governments seek to fool the citizenry into viewing survivalists as a fringe element and a dark underbelly of their otherwise serene state sponsored existence.

In contrast, I would like to point out to the non-prepper populace the advantages of having some of us “loony” survivalists around.  Rarely in the mainstream are we ever presented with the utility of survival proponents, and how they actually serve the interests of the “greater good” to quote a phrase often used by drooling collectivists and statists who desperately try to defame the prepper subculture…

Advantage #1:  Survivalists Have Their Own Stuff – They Don’t Need Your Stuff

Survivalists have their own stuff, which means, they will likely not feel compelled to take your stuff, if, that is, you have any stuff worth having.  In the midst of a calamity, being surrounded by preppers is one of the best insurance policies a person could acquire.  Think about it; would you rather have me as a neighbor, with my guns, ammo, food supply, off-grid solar power and water, and anti-establishment angst, or, would you rather have some superficial sickly fake friendly suburban yuppie with a Mercedes, an overpriced boat, a $100,000-plus debt obligation, a repressed inferiority complex, a vicious department store-addicted trophy wife, three spoiled crusty children with a vocabulary of 80 words or less, and an empty pantry?  In a crisis, who is the real threat?  Come on!

Advantage #2:  Survivalists Keep To Themselves – Your Business Is Your Own

Have you ever lived in the metro areas of California, New York, or Illinois?  Ever notice how disgustingly nosy many people tend to become in the more socialist minded regions of America?  Neighborhood administrations that cite you for tall grass.  Permits on top of permits.  Sneers when you smoke a cigarette, even outdoors.  Environmental restrictions bordering on the insane.  City governments telling you what you are allowed to eat and drink and how much.  It’s so enraging it makes you want to wrench someone’s head off their neck and squeeze their skull like an oversized pimple.

Survivalists respect privacy.  Grow a garden on your front lawn.  Smoke your cigarettes (or whatever).  Drink your damned 2 liter mega-gulp.  Let your kids play with the water hose for hours, or open a lemonade stand.  Don’t worry; the authorities will never be told, because we don’t care.  We have far more important things to worry about.

Advantage #3:  Survivalists Are Handy

Ever have that one friend, or neighbor, or family member who just seems to have all the right answers when it comes to gardening, or solar power, or repairing that hunting rifle?  Who knows all the best camping and fishing spots?  Who always seems to be willing to go out of his way to help you set up a good emergency kit in case of that next hurricane, flood, tornado, earthquake, etc?  You may very well be working with a survivalist and not even know it.

Advantage #4:  Survivalists Insulate A Region

The more survivalists there are in a particular area, the more likely you are to get through a disaster, whether you have prepared for it or not.  A network of survival communities offers an enormous variety of skills, an alternative economy and barter system to tap into, safety from harm during a major implosion or socially unstable times, and the ingenuity required to rebuild after the disaster.

Let me put it this way:  who is more likely to return your environment to a livable state?  Groups of survivalists with the know-how and the desire because they actually LIVE in the region?  Or, a faceless government bureaucracy like FEMA with no meaningful ties to the community in which you live?

Advantage #5:  Survivalists Cook Up A Mean Barbeque 

Show me a survivalist that doesn’t grill like an artist.  I defy you!

Advantage #6:  Survivalists Stand Their Ground When It Counts

If you ever need someone to back you up in a terrible situation, you can’t do much better than a survivalist.  They are used to adversity.  In fact, many of us deliberately put ourselves through strenuous training environments in order to learn where we will falter.  We make a point to uncover our own weaknesses and improve upon them.  Our current comfort obsessed society is almost devoid of this characteristic.  Finding a single person who will not let you down is a gift.  Finding an entire movement of such people is a miracle.  Don’t let it go to waste…

Advantage #7:  Survivalists Are Time Capsules For Liberty

Every culture needs watchmen.  Not government paid watchmen who seek out power, but citizen volunteers who shun power.  Without such watchmen, fundamental principles can be lost or destroyed, and the people of a nation are apt to forget where they came from, and what made them successful in the first place.  Though the masses have a tendency to be lured away from the legacy of freedom which once served them towards the twisted ideologies of tyrants and collectivists, in the long run they always return, seeking the almost forgotten abundances of liberty.  When the people go searching for freedom once again, the survivalists, the enduring watchmen, will be waiting to greet them.

Advantage #8:  Survivalists Are Not Afraid To Remind Society Of Its Mistakes

It is easy to be apathetic to the criminality of government.  It is easy to cocoon one’s self inside his own little life, within the minor dramas of his family and of his job.  It is easy to turn away from the big picture and hope that the monsters of the world sort themselves out, or overlook us entirely.  Unfortunately, this is not how human history has ever been resolved.  The worst problems never disappear on their own.  Survivalists understand this and are willing to take personal risks in order to uncover the nature of the beast for anyone willing to listen.  They understand that their best chance of survival is to preempt a disaster before it ever occurs.  The value of this to the longevity of our species cannot be calculated.  Without those who can overcome the fears created by conformity, mankind is lost.  Our very future depends upon the principles of survivalism, which teaches us to embrace our individuality, love the individualism within others, stand unyielding in the face of oppression, and fight to our dying breath to see that the best in all of us is one day fully realized.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

Climate Change and the Next U.S. Revolution

The U.S. heat wave is slowly shaking the foundations of American politics. It may take years for the deep rumble to evolve into an above ground, institution-shattering earthquake, but U.S. society has changed for good.

The heat wave has helped convince tens of millions of Americans that climate change is real, overpowering the fake science and right-wing media – funded by corporate cash – to convince Americans otherwise.

Republicans and Democrats alike also erect roadblocks to understanding climate change. By the politicians’ complete lack of action towards addressing the issue, the “climate change is fake” movement was strengthened, since Americans presumed that any sane government would be actively trying to address an issue that had the potential to destroy civilization.

But working people have finally made up their mind. A recent poll showed that70 percent of Americans now believe that climate change is real, up from 52 percent in 2010. And a growing number of people are recognizing that the warming of the planet is caused by human activity.

Business Week explains: “A record heat wave, drought and catastrophic wildfires are accomplishing what climate scientists could not: convincing a wide swath of Americans that global temperatures are rising.”

This means that working class families throughout the Midwest and southern states simply don’t believe what their media and politicians are telling them.

It also implies that these millions of Americans are being further politicized in a deeper sense.

Believing that climate change exists implies that you are somewhat aware about the massive consequences to humanity if the global economy doesn’t drastically change, and fast.

This awareness has revolutionary implications. As millions of Americans watch the environment destroyed – for their grandchildren or themselves – while politicians do absolutely nothing in response, or make tiny token gestures – a growing number of Americans will demand political alternatives, and fight to see them created. The American political system as it exists today cannot cope with this inevitable happening.

The New York Times explains why: “…the American political system is not ready to agree to a [climate] treaty that would force the United States, over time, to accept profound changes in its energy [coal, oil], transport [trucking and airline industry] and manufacturing [corporate] sectors.”

In short, the U.S. government will not force corporations to make less profit by behaving more eco-friendly. This is the essence of the problem.

In order for humanity to survive climate change, the economy must be radically transformed; massive investments must be made in renewable energy, public transportation, and recycling, while dirty energy sources must be quickly swept into the dustbin of history.

But the economy is currently owned by giant, privately run corporations, that will continue destroying the earth if it earns them huge profits, and they make massive “contributions” to political parties to ensure this remains so. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that government inaction on climate change is directly linked to the “special interests” of corporations that dominate these governments.

This fact of U.S. politics is present in every other capitalist country as well, which means that international agreements on reducing greenhouse gasses will remain impossible, as each country’s corporations vie for market domination, reducing pollution simply puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

This dynamic has already caused massive delays in the UN’s already inadequate efforts at addressing climate change. The Kyoto climate agreement was the by-product of years of cooperation and planning between many nations that included legally binding agreements to reduce greenhouse gasses. The Bush and Obama administrations helped destroy these efforts.

For example, Instead of building upon the foundation of the Kyoto Protocol, the Obama administration demanded a whole new structure, something that would take years to achieve. The Kyoto framework (itself insufficient) was abandoned because it included legally binding agreements, and was based on multilateral, agreed-upon reductions of greenhouse gasses.

In an article by the Guardian entitled “US Planning to Weaken Copenhagen Climate Deal,” the Obama administration’s UN position is exposed, as he dismisses the Kyoto Protocol by proposing that “…each country set its own rules and to decide unilaterally how to meet its target.”

Obama’s proposal came straight from the mouth of U.S. corporations, who wanted to ensure that there was zero accountability, zero oversight, zero climate progress, and therefore no dent to their profits. Instead of using its massive international leverage for climate justice, the U.S. has used it to promote divisiveness and inaction, to the potential detriment of billions of people globally.

The stakes are too high to hold out any hope that governments will act boldly. The Business Week article below explains the profound changes happening to the climate:

“The average temperature for the U.S. during June was 71.2 degrees Fahrenheit (21.7 Celsius), which is 2 degrees higher than the average for the 20th century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The June temperatures made the preceding 12 months the warmest since record-keeping began in 1895, the government agency said.”

Activists who are radicalized by this global problem face a crisis of what to do about it. It is difficult to put forth a positive climate change demand, since the problem is global.  Demanding that governments “act boldly” to address climate change hasn’t worked, and lesser demands seem inadequate.

The environmental rights movement continues to go through a variety of phases: individual and small group eco-”terrorism,” causing property damage to environmentally damaging companies; corporate campaigns that target especially bad polluters with high-profile direct action; and massive education programs that have been highly successful, but fall short when it comes to winning change.

Ultimately, climate activists must come face to face with political and corporate power. Corporate-owned governments are the ones with the power to adequately address the climate change issue, and they will not be swayed by good science, common sense, basic decency, or even a torched planet.

Those in power only respond to power, and the only power capable of displacing corporate power is when people unite and act collectively, as was done in Egypt, Tunisia, and is still developing throughout Europe.

Climate groups cannot view their issue as separate from other groups that are organizing against corporate power. The social movements that have emerged to battle austerity measures are natural allies, as are anti-war and labor activists. The climate solution will inevitably require revolutionary measures, which first requires that alliances and demands are put forward that unite Labor, working people in general, community, and student groups towards collective action.

One possible immediate demand is for environmental activists to unite with Labor groups over a federal jobs program, paid  for by taxing the rich, that makes massive investments in jobs that are climate related, such as solar panel production, transportation, building recycling centers, home retro-fitting, etc.

Another demand could be to insist that the government convene the most knowledgeable scientists in the area of clean energy. These scientists should be given all the resources they need in order to collectively create alternative sources of clean energy that would allow for a realistic alternative to the current polluting and toxic sources of energy.

However, any type of immediate demand will meet giant corporate resistance from both political parties. Fighting for a uniting demand will thus strengthen the movement, and for this reason it is important to link climate solutions to the creation of jobs, which are the number one concern of most Americans. This unity will in turn lead allies toward a deeper understanding of the problem, and therefore deeper solutions will emerge that challenge the whole economic structure that is deaf to the needs of humans and the climate and sacrifices everything to the private profit of a few.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-18/record-heat-wave-pushes-u-dot-s-dot-belief-in-climate-change-to-70-percent

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/weekinreview/13broder.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/15/europe-us-copenhagen

Apocalyptic Fever Running High

Apocalyptic fever is running high.  A friend in the Bible Belt, who recently became “born again,” called me excitedly to tell me she was leaving me her house. “In case I suddenly vanish,” she confided.

Of course.  She would be raptured up and I, a hard core “One God” believer, would be left behind. How sweet of her to make preparations for the damned.

But the projected date for the rapture came and went and disappointed, my friend abandoned her new found religion. Not so fast for the 2012-er’s however.  The end of the world is still scheduled for December 21, 2012 according to those who buy into the Mayan prophecies, Planet X, Niburu, exponential solar flares –did I miss anything?

The scenarios are stunning—tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, as the world comes crashing down around us.

And should we awaken the morning of December 22 to find ourselves still alive, the ratcheting up of doomsday prophecies will deflate like a spent balloon.

And we just may find ourselves sucker-punched.

Lurking right under our noses is the specter of what may occur in 2013.  While another war in the Middle East and a global pandemic might pale in comparison with the cataclysmic changes promised by the 2012-ers, the result might be very close to the same thing. We may not see the hand of God reach down and pluck His faithful from this troubled planet, we may not see  benign aliens beam themselves down into our living rooms while the walls are imploding around us, but the effect of what the governments of the world have cooked  up may result in a similar upheaval.

The announcements that the global pandemic will hit in 2013 have hardly been ear splitting.  One has to be attentive to find these predictions, which are being made by such insiders as former Senators Jim Talent and Bob Graham (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2M0eZ9GAdc) both of the WMD center (http://www.wmdcenter.org/).  Also weighing in on the 2013 Big Bug scenario is Dr. Daniel Gerstein of the Department of Homeland Security. Gerstein made this prediction during a side event hosted by the US at the Biological Weapons Convention just last December.

And what would be the connection between a global pandemic and those attending to biological weapons, like Graham, Talent and Gerstein?

A parallel thread runs through this last decade, right alongside the events of 911 and the fallout from that event. The parallel thread pertains to the anthrax attacks, which took place only one week later. Our government responded to the attacks of 911 with a Draconian shift towards a top heavy surveillance society and a concomitant stripping of our civil liberties, all of which has  made us increasingly vulnerable to government intrusion and attack.  Emphasis on the word “attack.” The response to the anthrax mailings was to invest billions of dollars in a biological warfare program for which there is no transparency and no public oversight.

Since September of 2001, the U.S. government has pumped over 60 billion dollars into what it euphemistically terms “biodefense.” Let’s take a moment to consider what has gone into that program and what has come out the other end.  The concept of “dual use” is the first thing we must consider in order to understand what constitutes “biodefense.”  To put it simply, dual use means that you first have to create the bug in order to find the cure.

And our biodefense program is top heavy with bugs: ebola, marburg, anthrax, we got ‘em and we are secretly working to cut and splice natural horrors into recombinant nightmares.

And that brings us to the crux of the matter.  What goes on in these “biodefense” labs  are occluded by protestations of “national security.” The now defunct Sunshine Project, which was dedicated to   working “against the hostile use of biotechnology in the post-Cold War era,” found that there was little if  any oversight as to the types of research going on in these labs.  In 2007,  in a report submitted to the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for the Hearing: Germs, Viruses, and Secrets: The Silent Proliferation of Bio-Laboratories in the United States, Sunshine Project Director Edward Hammond wrote the following: “Our research indicates that in the vast majority of cases, it is not possible to verify that federally funded research is properly overseen at the local level, nor are the local committees that are charged with overseeing this research actually required to produce meeting minutes or annual reports that demonstrate that they have fulfilled this charge.” Elsewhere in the report, he states that “lab expansion under the Bush administration has gone far beyond what is prudent and necessary, and without an adequate regulatory framework.”

In summary, Hammond blasted the biodefense industry and wrote “The proliferation of BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories across the United States since 2002 is greater than what our country needs and what its safety and security net can absorb. One-off NEPA processes are not sufficient or appropriate for this national-scale problem .Congress should impose a moratorium on federal funding for construction and commissioning of new biodefense labs. No new construction contracts should be issued, and no new labs should open until a comprehensive needs assessment is performed by the Government Accountability Office.”

One must ask what has come out of all these billions pumped into biodefense.  The answer is clouded. We do know that we have not even produced a second generation anthrax vaccine. The first generation anthrax vaccine was reputed to cause Gulf War Syndrome and other ills. A scientist working in a BSL-3 in Arizona proudly informed me recently that he has developed a smallpox vaccine that also cures herpes.  Awesome, bro…except we pretty much stomped out smallpox decades ago….

When informed of the plans for a new biodefense campus at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, local activists became alarmed.   Beth Willis, chairwoman of the Frederick County Containment Lab Advisory Committee and founder of Frederick Citizens for Biolab safety, has stated concerns that the plans for the Homeland Security lab at Detrick may be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.  The DHS facility has opened but is not yet fully operational. While some of the Frederick activists have stopped short of declaring that the US has indeed launched an offensive biological weapons program, others are not so shy. Barry Kissin, an attorney and activist in Frederick has stated that the US is now illegally producing and stockpiling biological weapons.

In order to produce biological weapons you must first have a lab, properly outfitted for the seriousness of bug you are working with. The labs are designated from BSL-1 through 5, with the 3’s and 4’s housing the most dangerous bugs known to man. The 5′s purportedly deal with space bugs, although you wouldn´t ever hear that from the CDC. That agency recently responded to a FOIA Request about the containment specifications for the 5’s, stating that these records were not in their office. The CDC, which has the responsibility for tracking these bugs and registering the labs, is furiously shoveling out disinfo about the proliferations of 3’s and 4’s ,   tripping over itself in its eagerness to convince us that there are no more BSL-3 and 4 labs than before 911.

In fact, the proliferation of these labs has been astounding. There are at least 1360 BSL-3′s at this juncture, according to documents released by the DOJ and DOE  (although the CDC insists the number is closer to 250).  The CDC can only count as far as six when it comes to BSL-4s, although independent sources, such as the Federation for American Scientists, have come up with a head count of 13. Factor in the existence of secret labs on military bases, evidenced by the C.V.’s of a couple of engineering firms which proudly state that they constructed BSL-4s on at least two  bases, and the numbers of these labs , like Topsy, just keep on growing.

If a global pandemic should hit in 2013, the chances are good that we will have caused it through the release of a biological weapon that has been cooked up in one of these labs. The similarities between what is now happening in the US and what happened in Germany in the thirties are perturbing: A false flag event used to topple our civil rights and a project to poison us with …well, this time it won’t be Zyklon- B.

If our government learned anything from the mistakes made by Adolph Hitler, it was to keep appearances up.  The public image maintained by the United States is that of freedom and justice. The image is straining due to the weight of evidence to the contrary, and the more evidence that accumulates the higher pitched are the denials being issued by the State.

This reporter has been working off information provided by a high level source back in 2003, when he confided that the State of Israel would be destroyed around the time that the bugs were selectively released.   Israel, you say?  You thought Israel was pulling the strings all along, did you?

Israel was very likely set up to be destroyed.  A haven for the Jews after the horrific events of WWII and the holocaust morphed into a ghetto for those far- flung in the diaspora.  Forty percent of the world’s Jews now reside in Israel. A well placed missile or two and you’ve gotten rid of 7,848,800 people–approximately 5,865,300 are Jews.  Hitler will be high- fiving from the seventh circle of Hell.

The government of Israel is just itching to get into this war with Iran, a war for which Israel is poorly prepared, defensively speaking.  The much touted  “Iron dome”, Israel’s primary missile defense system, only works for incoming projectiles that are launched from nearby, like Gaza.  Israel is largely unprotected from a fly- over. Factor in the state- of- the- art S-300 defense system possessed by Iran, and the odds that Israel will survive this war appear to be almost non- existent.

Israel wiped off the map due to all the trouble fomented by the United States in the Middle East, culminating with a manufactured war with Iran and then a fatal bug, released through a selective mechanism such as the double line water system (http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2007/05/10214.php) or the imposter pharmaceuticals— and  there you have the makings of another  holocaust, all done under the mantle of plausible deniability.  The US comes out squeaky clean, as it scampers to innoculate its citizenry with vaccinations which may serve to further reduce its population, while insisting that all along, we tried to support Israel.

The hell, you say. The Zionists run the world! Well, yes and no. If the Zionists are the same guys, heavily anti-Semitic, (such as Mark Sykes and Otto Rand, ) who set up the State of Israel in order to lure the world’s Jews into that alleged haven—a desert mirage– so that Boom! Then yes, those Zionists may indeed run the world. And some of those Zionists are Jews. The Jews are ill informed as to the traitors within their midst, the same sort of saboteurs as Stephen Wise, head of the US Jewish Congress during WWII.  Wise lobbied heavily to keep the Eastern European Jews from immigrating to the United States, thus ensuring they would be unable to escape Hitler’s death machine. This reporter has had her own skirmishes with duplicitous leadership in the Jewish community, some of which are discussed in this article.

And please, don’t get me wrong. The Jews are certainly not the only ones on the chopping block. When the dust clears, after the Big Bug strikes, we will likely see a world divested of much of its people of color. This is already happening.

Africa is being emptied out by AIDS.  Dark- skinned people are also now experiencing an epidemic of the “silent killers” of diabetes and hypertension, believed to be a product of a biological weapon leaked into food and attaching onto melanin (those with darker skin have more melanin). According to Dr. Trudy Gaillard, a researcher and with the Wexner Medical Center, about 12% of African Americans are now diagnosed with diabetes, three times as many as reported in 1980.  The actual figures may be quite a bit higher. If you look at the statistics for African American women over the age of 55, 25% are now diagnosed with diabetes.  The numbers are also up for other dark- skinned groups, such as indigenous Mexicans and Pacific Islanders.

Dr. Wouter Basson, who sailed through the South African Truth and Reconciliation hearings, was under scrutiny for his work with Project Coast, which was the apartheid government’s biological weapons group.  Basson was purportedly working on developing a “blacks only” bioweapons back in the 1980’s  The epidemic of diabetes and hypertension among people of color began to surface shortly thereafter. Was Basson successful in creating this race specific bioweapons? He ain’t talking.

And, as a writer-friend in Los Angeles once noted, “Anyone who will sell out his brother for his own safety gets to sit at the table.” The resonant and beautiful voices of resistance may also succumb to the selectively delivered Big Bug.  How convenient and diabolical this plan is.  Any problem person, any out- of -favor demographic group, and our beneficent government utilities and/or Big Pharma will provide the final solution. No recriminations and no onus of responsibility. No Nuremberg Trials, no Truth and Reconciliation Commission and no one pointing the finger at anything except a wayward microbe, an accident of nature.

Just a whole lot of burying to do and the world made over, in a different image: Obedient and lily white. A Nazi’s wet dream.

The Biological Weapons Convention will meet twice this year in Geneva for intersessional meetings.  I hope to be able to attend in an effort to impact the direction of the above cited course of events. I need your help to do so. Please visit janetphelan.com to contribute for travel expenses via PayPal.  At the BWC in December, I blew the whistle on the illegal biological weapons program being run by the United States government. It was a good beginning and so much more needs to be done. The time is short.

Fukushima – A Giant Nail In The Coffin Of Humanity

For the past few weeks, word of the extent of the Fukushima disaster is spreading like the radiation slick moving across the Pacific Ocean thanks to social media and a lot of newly concerned citizens.

Independent researchers who have been trying to warn people for over a year are finally being heard. Much of that can be attributed to citizen journalists, who have realized mainstream media dropped the ball on this a long time ago.

To understand the dynamics of information and how it has been controlled, you would have to look at companies like General Electric and Westinghouse, who not only build nuclear reactors, but own major news outlets and, of course, are buddy-buddy with the Obama Administration.

Or, I can just tell you about it, since I have spent countless hours researching these connections and interviewing people about it. More on that at a later date. It deserves a nice big page in itself, with room for lots of details.

Not only do we have citizen journalists and the alternative media on top of this, but citizen scientists as well.

Have you met your new Fukushima expert, who just might live right next door? These are people who have taught themselves everything they possibly could about nuclear physics, radiation, Geiger counters, atomic power, nuclear plants, the effects of radiation on health, and radiation mitigation.

These citizen scientists have studied bombs, fallout, and weather and wind patterns. They have been monitoring radiation levels across the country, with their own equipment they purchased out of pocket and learned how to use.

They have read anything and everything they can get their hands on. They know the difference between alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, and how to avoid it.

They know that besides cancer, radiation can do all kinds of things to you, like severely compromise your immune system, intelligence, and thyroid, or make you aggressive, confused, and fatigued.

You might bruise or bleed in weird places and feel sick more than usual. They have learned all this out of their own instincts of survival.

Sometimes they even go 2 days without sleep, when bad stuff is happening, just to make sure they are keeping on top of the issues as much as possible.

It’s amazing what you can do in a short period of time when your life depends on it. And the more that they learn, the greater their sense of urgency has become in bringing this info to the masses.

And what conclusion have these citizen journalists and citizen scientists reached throughout 14 months of study?

They have come to the inevitable conclusion that all of our lives changed on March 11, 2011, when Fukushima went out of control.

The glaring problem is that we that we weren’t told about what actually happened.

Take, for instance, the fact that there were 3 meltdowns almost right away, and that the radioactive isotopes that blew all over Japan, Hawaii, Alaska, Canada and North America came in extraordinarily high quantities.

Or how various agencies that taxpayers have funded, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), did not do their job which is to protect the environment, and us.

In fact the EPA turned off their monitors for about a month, for the first time in their history. These are expensive and delicate pieces of equipment the taxpayers had already bought and paid for, for just such an emergency.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) knew, but they hid the information. The Obama Administration knew, but sent Hillary Clinton over to Japan to shake hands with the Prime Minister and show support.

Obama came out with a statement to the American people, saying, “We do not believe harmful levels of radiation will reach our shores,” which we now know was a lie.

We had to figure all this out for ourselves, which was difficult because the information was purposely withheld from us.

Despite their best efforts, they can’t stop the truth from leaking out of Fukushima. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have now proven this beyond a doubt.

Conspiracy theory is becoming conspiracy fact. And now we are going public with this information, and in a very big way.

It has been around 3 weeks since I wrote my first article for End the Lie, and still no real progress to report at the plant itself.

Tons of water continues to get poured into the reactors and flow subsequently into the Pacific Ocean, every second of every day.

Radiation continues to steam itself out of the ground, and thus up into the air, which then blows over us (i.e. resident of the northern hemisphere).

Earthquakes still happen daily around Japan. In fact there were 7 or 8 of them just in the past few days near Fukushima.

The spent fuel still sits in its shaky nest at the top of reactor number 4. Nothing has been done to further reinforce the structure.

The good news (if you can really call it that) is that it hasn’t fallen yet. The United Nations and the United States are now in their most preliminary stages of addressing the complexity of problems there, in an attempt to see if they can help out.

But as you know, the wheels of bureaucracy turn very slowly. It took almost 14 months for them to start turning at all.

Besides the ongoing releases into the ocean and air and the precariousness of the pool, we have a debris field the size of Texas starting to hit the west coast and Alaska, which may or may not be radioactive.

Japan has been burning radioactive trash, and will continue to do so until at least 2014, and that blows over us as well.

We have a radioactive slick moving across the ocean, which by all estimates should have sunk to the bottom, but hasn’t. And we have sick and dying mammals, fish, and birds all over the world, which may or may not be related, but should still be an enormous concern, since many of them are being found in the Pacific.

That is part of the problem when you are faced with the world’s largest disaster. All of the models for how to deal with it can be thrown out the window.

All the assumptions about fallout and it working itself into the food chain have been wrong. It was much worse, and has happened much faster, than anyone expected, even for concerned citizens and independent researchers following this closely.

The government knew this would be the case from the early SPEEDI numbers, which were hand translated and delivered to the US government as they happened. But for the most part, Fukushima has exceeded everyone’s expectations.

New ideas, new techniques, and new engineering has to be invented and implemented. New observations have to be made, and they are, as can be seen by searching “mutations” on YouTube and watching some videos.

We have citizen journalists and citizen scientists who are desperately trying to come up with solutions, and are doing it for free, while our government and agencies created to “protect us” continue to collect their paycheck, roll their eyes, shove their hands in their pockets and hum a tune like they’re waiting for a taxi.

But out of crisis, comes opportunity. I’ll use 9/11 again as an example.

Why do people get a warm fuzzy feeling when we see people rushing to aid those in the midst of disaster? Because we humans are hard-wired to care for others, and long to be part of a community.

Out of disaster, there is camaraderie, sympathy, and empathy. There are important lessons to be learned.

There are whole new industries that could be created out of this crisis, putting people to work. Aquaponics. Decontamination. Mitigation. Food testing.

And since we didn’t seem to learn these lessons with Chernobyl, we need to learn them right now.

All nuclear power does is boil water and create steam, which turbines turn into electricity. But when something goes wrong, it has the ability to kill everything on the planet. That is where we are at now.

We need to adapt if we are to survive. And part of that adaptation means we need to eliminate the possibility of this ever happening again, starting with the 23 reactors the same style as Fukushima, in the United States, which is the Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor, or BWR.

People in the industry jokingly refer to these as “double-decker beach-bombs,” for the reason that the spent fuel is located in pools at the top of the reactor buildings, and they are usually located at a water source for emergency cooling purposes for when the fecal matter hits the fan at one of these plants.

In fact, several nuclear engineers who designed these reactors quit in protest before they went into production. They realized they had made a mistake. They realized this design would be extremely dangerous. GE went ahead and built them anyway.

When is the world going to realize the mistake of embracing nuclear energy as a power source, in spite of its danger?

And how long do we continue to ignore the brilliant scientists that warned about this, like Oppenheimer and Einstein? Or is it already too late?

There are no energy problems, in comparison. If you want to cut down on your electricity usage, turn off your TV.

We have natural gas deposits that could power everything we need. We have the power of the sun, water, wind and earth in the form of geothermal energy.

Nuclear power is a sham, just like the oil industry, and we have been duped into believing we need it to survive.

It generates billions and billions of dollars for these corporations. GE (who has the most ironic motto, “We Bring Good Things to Life”) made 14 billion dollars last year, and paid no taxes.

In addition to producing electricity, nuclear reactors also generate 500 pounds of plutonium a year per reactor, as a byproduct of the fission process.

What happens to all that highly toxic plutonium? The government gets to collect this material to make bombs, so we can go utterly decimate other countries, now known as “spreading democracy” and poison their populations for future generations.

Let’s not forget depleted uranium, or DU, which is now used in many military applications with horrific results.

Check out videos of children in Fallujah for some recent examples of this.

This is the one big secret that the nuke industry and our government will do anything to protect: besides being a billion dollar industry, nuke plants are basically bomb-making factories right under our noses.

Drawing attention to Fukushima would have drawn attention to this function of nuclear facilities.

An added side effect is that they also make people sick and help boost the health care industry, which in some states is now the number one private sector employer.

The plutonium and fission byproducts these plants produce help support our government’s number-one priority: the almighty military-industrial complex.

And it’s all in the name of money, power, and control. Energy companies hire top level advertisers and public relations people to promote and manipulate public opinion. Even during the Superbowl, ads were run showing how steam from nuclear power runs the turbines that make beer.

They want you to believe that we are dependent on this source of energy for our quality of life. The truth of the matter, on the other hand, is that nuclear power has ruined our lives.

Ask anyone who used to live in the ever-expanding evacuation zone in Japan, which may soon include the 35 million people in Tokyo.

Ask anyone who lives near a nuke plant and has a child with autism, gastroenteritis, or cancer. Just take a look at the statistics of cancer in the general population since we started embracing this technology.

The truth is: we have been nuked and are still getting nuked, every day, in a very big way.

I used to be a huge supporter of nuclear power, but 14 months of intensive study has changed my opinion significantly.

In addition to my studies, I have been influenced by some major health issues I developed after being outside the first 3 weeks after the reactors exploded. During that time I had a metallic-taste in my mouth, which I found out later was from tasting fission products. More on that later as well.

Nuclear cheerleaders like to complicate things in an attempt to make radiation something much harder to understand. That way it turns people off from the subject and they won’t pay attention as much.

The truth is, you don’t need to be a physicist, a scientist, or an expert in this field. You don’t need to know the differences between decay rates and half-lives, or cesium and strontium.

You only need to understand one thing: All radiation is bad, and all of it will make you sick, no matter how much Ann Coulter claims that the Japanese should be thankful for Fukushima.

The more you are exposed to it, the sicker you will be. The more places you can cut down on your exposure, the better off your health will be.

Radiation is cumulative. It builds up in the body. It destroys cells. It causes mutations in cell growth which can thus create cancer or other illnesses.

There is plenty of this radiation leaking out of Fukushima for over a year now, blowing around in our air, building up in our soil, and contaminating our water supply.

What’s worse, we have 104 of these plants in the United States, with special emphasis on the 23 previously mentioned, where this exact scenario is waiting to happen.

Radioactive steam comes out of these plants all the time, since as part of their normal operations. They vent to the atmosphere to keep things cool. Do some research into “rainshadow” in autism and brain cancer in children, and look where the numbers are the highest: around nuclear plants.

We can’t afford to wait or delay. If you aren’t already mitigating, you need to start now. You need to treat your health, and the health of your family, like you all have cancer already. That might sound like fear mongering to some, but this is one case where “better safe than sorry” truly applies.

This process involves eating healthy whole foods, filtering water, avoiding precipitation, taking supplements, and getting lots of sleep.

Stop eating fast food, and eat lower on the food chain, where bio-accumulation is less. Stop eating seafood, unless you know it is safe.

Include your children in these changes, because we will be dealing with this problem for at least the rest of our lives, and so will they.

We have to change our perspective. Quality of life becomes a much more important issue when your life expectancy has been shortened.

We have Fukushima to thank for this, and the nuclear industry, of course. As well as the various other individuals or agencies that tried to keep this information from us.

And then of course we have spent fuel pool doom lurking in the shadows. And for some unknown reason, Tepco seems to think their most immediate concern is building a huge underground wall, to contain something going on under the plant, the extent of which hasn’t yet been shared with us.

So what do they know that we don’t? Why is there a sense of urgency to contain something underground, when the spent fuel pool #4 is supposedly the weakest link in the Fukushima chain?

Where is all this technology we have to look for gas and oil, like ground-penetrating radar, optical coherence tomography, or even HAARP, to see what’s going on under the plants? What else is being hidden from us?

Instead of calling it game over, let’s play a new game called “No More Fukushimas.”

Let’s figure out ways to clean up this mess and not make more of them in the future. We can leave this for our children to deal with, that is if they are still here.

Or it is up to you, it is up to me, it is up to allof us to fix this situation, right now, as best as we possibly can.

Take care of your family first, have a plan for the worst-case scenario, then do what you can to help others.

Our lives all changed over a year ago, only you weren’t told about it. As bad as things are, there is a huge opportunity here for something wonderful to come out of this mess. A cleaner, brighter, healthier future for our children and generations to come. A future, period.

As a close associate of Obama once said, “Never let a crisis go to waste”. This might be the last crisis that we ever see, if we don’t so something about it.

Courtesy of MayanManifestor

Please send mutation images to christinax4@yahoo.com. Shoot at the highest resolution possible, and include your name, location, and date the mutation was found, for proper credit if the images are published. If it is from store-bought produce, include the location where it was grown and purchased. The more information you provide, the better you will be helping the rest of us.

Please help Christina purchase a spectrometer in order to get the most accurate radiation readings and thus get you the most precise information possible by shopping through her Amazon link or donate directly via PayPal to fukushimafacts@gmail.com. Keep in mind, this is expensive equipment and it is the only way that specific isotope readings can be obtained from food items.

Edited by Madison Ruppert

Christina Consolo is a former clinical researcher supervisor with NIH credentialing; a former Member-at-Large for the Board of Directors, Ophthalmic Photographers’ Society; A peer reviewer for the Journal of Ophthalmic Photography; She has written, published, and contributed to numerous scientific research in retinal imaging and ophthalmogy for the past 24 years; She is also an award-winning biomedical photographer and maintains several websites to teach people about radiation, mitigation, and other nuclear issues. She is also the host of “Nuked Radio” Tuesdays & Thursdays from 12-1:00 pm EST on theOrion Talk Radio Network.

For more info including mitigation for radiation exposure, please visit FukushimaFacts.com, where you can sign up to receive Fallout Forecasts on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Source: End the Lie

Japanese Plan To Evacuate 40 Million Revealed

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared by the Foreign Ministry on the planned re-opening of talks with Japan over the disputed Kuril Islands during the next fortnight states that Russian diplomats were “stunned” after being told by their Japanese counterparts that upwards of 40 million of their peoples were in “extreme danger” of life threatening radiation poisoning and could very well likely be faced with forced evacuations away from their countries eastern most located cities… including the world’s largest one, Tokyo.

The Kuril Islands are located in Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region and stretch approximately 1,300 km (810 miles) northeast from Hokkaido-, Japan, to Kamchatka, Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific Ocean. There are 56 islands and many more minor rocks. It consists of Greater Kuril Ridge and Lesser Kuril Ridge, all of which were captured by Soviet Forces in the closing days of World War II from the Japanese.

The “extreme danger” facing tens of millions of the Japanese peoples is the result of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster that was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the To-hoku earthquake and tsunamion 11 March 2011.

According to this report, Japanese diplomats have signaled to their Russian counterparts that the returning of the Kuril Islands to Japan is “critical” as they have no other place to resettle so many people that would, in essence, become the largest migration of human beings since the 1930’s when Soviet leader Stalin forced tens of millions to resettle Russia’s far eastern regions.

Important to note, this report continues, are that Japanese diplomats told their Russian counterparts that they were, also, “seriously considering” an offer by China to relocate tens of millions of their citizens to the Chinese mainland to inhabit what are called the “ghost cities,” built for reasons still unknown and described, in part, by London’s Daily Mail News Service in their 18 December 2010 article titled: “The Ghost Towns Of China: Amazing Satellite Images Show Cities Meant To Be Home To Millions Lying Deserted” that says:

“These amazing satellite images show sprawling cities built in remote parts of China that have been left completely abandoned, sometimes years after their construction. Elaborate public buildings and open spaces are completely unused, with the exception of a few government vehicles near communist authority offices. Some estimates put the number of empty homes at as many as 64 million, with up to 20 new cities being built every year in the country’s vast swathes of free land.”

Foreign Ministry experts in this report note that should Japan accept China’s offer, the combined power of these two Asian peoples would make them the largest super-power in human history with an economy larger than that of the United States and European Union combined and able to field a combined military force of over 200 million.

To how dire the situation is in Japan was recently articulated by Japanese diplomat Akio Matsumurawho warned that the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant may ultimately turn into an event capable of extinguishing all life on Earth.

According to the Prison Planet News Service:

“Matsumura posted [this] startling entry on his blog following a statement made by Japan’s former ambassador to Switzerland, Mitsuhei Murata, on the situation at Fukushima.

Speaking at a public hearing of the Budgetary Committee of the House of Councilors on 22 March 2012, Murata warned that “if the crippled building of reactor unit 4 – with 1,535 fuel rods in the spent fuel pool 100 feet (30 meters) above the ground – collapses, not only will it cause a shutdown of all six reactors but will also affect the common spent fuel pool containing 6,375 fuel rods, located some 50 meters from reactor 4,” writes Matsumura.

In both cases the radioactive rods are not protected by a containment vessel; dangerously, they are open to the air. This would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced. He stressed that the responsibility of Japan to the rest of the world is immeasurable. Such a catastrophe would affect us all for centuries. Ambassador Murata informed us that the total numbers of the spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi site excluding the rods in the pressure vessel is 11,421.”

Disturbingly, the desperate situation facing Japan is, also, facing the United States as Russian military observers overflying the US this week as part of the Open Skies Treaty are reporting “unprecedented” amounts of radiation in the Western regions of that country, a finding that was further confirmed by scientists with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who have confirmed that a wave of highly radioactive waste is headed directly for the US west coast.

Important to note is that this new wave of Fukushima radiation headed towards the US is in addition to earlier radiation events that American scientists are now blaming for radioactive particles from Japan being detected in California kelp.

Though the news of this ongoing global catastrophe is still being heavily censored in the US, the same cannot be said about Japan, and as recently reported by the leading Japanese newspaper The Mainichi Daily News that reports:

“One of the biggest issues that we face is the possibility that the spent nuclear fuel pool of the No. 4 reactor at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant will collapse. This is something that experts from both within and outside Japan have pointed out since the massive quake struck. TEPCO, meanwhile, says that the situation is under control. However, not only independent experts, but also sources within the government say that it’s a grave concern.

The storage pool in the No. 4 reactor building has a total of 1,535 fuel rods, or 460 tons of nuclear fuel, in it. The 7-story building itself has suffered great damage, with the storage pool barely intact on the building’s third and fourth floors. The roof has been blown away. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode, causing a massive amount of radioactive substances to spread over a wide area. Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and French nuclear energy company Areva have warned about this risk.

A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant’s No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be “the weakest link” in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster. The worse-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate.”

Even though this crisis in Japan has been described as “a nuclear war without a war” and the US Military is being reported is now stocking up on massive amounts of anti-radiation pills in preparation for nuclear fallout, there remains no evidence at all the ordinary peoples are being warned about this danger in any way whatsoever.

Source: RSN

Is Fukushima’s Doomsday Machine About To Blow?

Mounting troubles at Japan’s hobbled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant now pose a real threat to human survival. If the area in which Unit 4 is struck by another 7.0 magnitude earthquake, there’s a 70 percent chance that “the entire fuel pool structure will collapse” and massive doses of lethal nuclear radiation will be released into the atmosphere. The disaster would release approximately “134 million curies is Cesium-137 — roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at Chernobyl as estimated by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP).” Experts believe that the amounts are sufficient to “destroy the world environment and our civilization”, which makes containment “an issue of human survival.” (“The Greatest Single Threat to Humanity: Fuel Pool Number 4″, Washington’s blog)

The structural integrity of Unit 4′s cooling pool was greatly compromised by the earthquake and following tsunami which struck the facility over a year ago. At present, the pools are not adequately protected or reinforced, which means that a sizable tremor could “cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns.” If such a disaster were to occur, “people should get out of Japan, and residents of the West Coast of America and Canada should shut all of their windows and stay inside,” says nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen.

While the danger to life and the environment pose the greatest single national security threat the United States has faced since WW2, the Obama administration has provided little aid to the emergency effort. Japan is largely “going it alone” trying to cobble together a plan to safely store the spent fuel and minimize the risks to public safety.

On March 8, 2012, Dr. Hiroaki Koide, Research Associate at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University, gave his bleak assessment of the situation on the Japanese a news program called, “Morning Bird”. Koide explained how 1,500 rods are presently located in a “fuel pool” that has been severely damaged. The rods have to be cooled constantly or a “huge amount of radiation contained in the spent fuel will be released outside”. If an earthquake hits and undermines the pool, the coolant will exit the pool, the rods will melt and radioactive plumes will rise into the atmosphere. Koide explained that the rods could not be safely removed from the existing pool because “if you hoist them up in the air, huge amount of radiation will come out from the spent fuel and people nearby will die.”

One of the journalists on “Morning Bird” asked Koide what would happen if the Unit was struck by another earthquake?

Koide answered, “That will be the end.”

“The end,” the journalist asked, visibly shaken?

“The end,” Koide repeated emphatically. (“Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 4: An earthquake before spent fuel rods are moved to safe storage would be “the end”, Lambert Strether, Naked Capitalism)

Now, check this out:

“Japan’s former Ambassador to Switzerland, Mr. Mitsuhei Murata… strongly stated that if the crippled building of reactor unit 4—with 1,535 fuel rods in the spent fuel pool 100 feet (30 meters) above the ground—collapses, not only will it cause a shutdown of all six reactors but it will also affect the common spent fuel pool containing 6,375 fuel rods, located some 50 meters from reactor 4. In both cases the radioactive rods are not protected by a containment vessel; dangerously, they are open to the air. This would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced. … Such a catastrophe would affect us all for centuries.”
(“Fukushima Daiichi Site: Cesium-137 is 85 times greater than at Chernobyl Accident”, akiomatsumura.com)

Murata’s concerns have been brought to the attention of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to high-ranking officials in the Obama administration and EU, and to leaders around the world. The reaction has basically been the same everywhere, which is, “It’s Japan’s problem. Let them deal with it.”

There is no way to overstate the media’s complicity in concealing critical information about the tragedy that is presently unfolding at Fukushima. If there is another earthquake, the media will certainly be every bit as responsible as the government officials who saw the danger, but chose to do nothing.

War Porn: The New Safe Sex

The early 21st century is addicted to war porn, a prime spectator sport consumed by global couch and digital potatoes. War porn took the limelight on the evening of September 11, 2001, when the George W Bush administration launched the “war on terror” – which was interpreted by many of its practitioners as a subtle legitimization of United States state terror against, predominantly, Muslims.

This was also a war OF terror – as in a manifestation of state terror pitting urban high-tech might against basically rural, low-tech cunning. The US did not exercise this monopoly; Beijing practiced it in Xinjiang, its far west, and Russia practiced it in Chechnya.

Like porn, war porn cannot exist without being based on a lie – a crude representation. But unlike porn, war porn is the real thing; unlike crude, cheap snuff movies, people in war porn actually die – in droves.

The lie to finish all lies at the center of this representation was definitely established with the leak of the 2005 Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British MI6 confirmed that the Bush administration wanted to take out Iraq’s Saddam Hussein by linking Islamic terrorism with (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD). So, as the memo put it, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

In the end, George “you’re either with us or against us” Bush did star in his own, larger-than-life snuff movie – that happened to double as the invasion and destruction of the eastern flank of the Arab nation.

The New Guernica

Iraq may indeed be seen as the Star Wars of war porn – an apotheosis of sequels. Take the (second) Fallujah offensive in late 2004. At the time I described it as the new Guernica. I also took the liberty of paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about the Algerian War; after Fallujah no two Americans shall meet without a corpse lying between them. To quote Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, there were bodies, bodies everywhere.

The Francisco Franco in Fallujah was Iyad Allawi, the US-installed interim premier. It was Allawi who “asked” the Pentagon to bomb Fallujah. In Guernica – as in Fallujah – there was no distinction between civilians and guerrillas: it was the rule of “Viva la muerte!”

United States Marine Corps commanders said on the record that Fallujah was the house of Satan. Franco denied the massacre in Guernica and blamed the local population – just as Allawi and the Pentagon denied any civilian deaths and insisted “insurgents” were guilty.

Fallujah was reduced to rubble, at least 200,000 residents became refugees, and thousands of civilians were killed, in order to “save it” (echoes of Vietnam). No one in Western corporate media had the guts to say that in fact Fallujah was the American Halabja.

Fifteen years before Fallujah, in Halabja, Washington was a very enthusiastic supplier of chemical weapons to Saddam, who used them to gas thousands of Kurds. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time said it was not Saddam; it was Khomeinist Iran. Yet Saddam did it, and did it deliberately, just like the US in Fallujah.

Fallujah doctors identified swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries, as well as “melted bodies” – victims of napalm, the cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel. Residents who managed to escape told of bombing by “poisonous gases” and “weird bombs that smoke like a mushroom cloud … and then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. The pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when you throw water over them.”

That’s exactly what happens to people bombed with napalm or white phosphorus. The United Nations banned the bombing of civilians with napalm in 1980. The US is the only country in the world still using napalm.

Fallujah also provided a mini-snuff movie hit; the summary execution of a wounded, defenseless Iraqi man inside a mosque by a US Marine. The execution, caught on tape, and watched by millions on YouTube, graphically spelled out the “special” rules of engagement. US Marine commanders at the time were telling their soldiers to “shoot everything that moves and everything that doesn’t move”; to fire “two bullets in every body”; in case of seeing any military-aged men in the streets of Fallujah, to “drop ‘em”; and to spray every home with machine-gun and tank fire before entering them.

The rules of engagement in Iraq were codified in a 182-page field manual distributed to each and every soldier and issued in October 2004 by the Pentagon. This counter-insurgency manual stressed five rules; “protect the population; establish local political institutions; reinforce local governments; eliminate insurgent capabilities; and exploit information from local sources.”

Now back to reality. Fallujah’s population was not protected: it was bombed out of the city and turned into a mass of thousands of refugees. Political institutions were already in place: the Fallujah Shura was running the city. No local government can possibly run a pile of rubble to be recovered by seething citizens, not to mention be “reinforced”. “Insurgent capabilities” were not eliminated; the resistance dispersed around the 22 other cities out of control by the US occupation, and spread up north all the way to Mosul; and the Americans remained without intelligence “from local sources” because they antagonized every possible heart and mind.

Meanwhile, in the US, most of the population was already immune to war porn. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke out in the spring of 2004, I was driving through Texas, exploring Bushland. Virtually everybody I spoke to either attributed the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to “a few bad apples”, or defended it on patriotic grounds (“we must teach a lesson to “terrorists”).

I Love A Man In Uniform

In thesis, there is an approved mechanism in the 21st century to defend civilians from war porn. It’s the R2P – “responsibility to protect” doctrine. This was an idea floated already in 2001 – a few weeks after the war on terror was unleashed, in fact – by the Canadian government and a few foundations. The idea was that the concert of nations had a “moral duty” to deploy a humanitarian intervention in cases such as Halabja, not to mention the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the mid-1970s or the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

In 2004, a panel at the UN codified the idea – crucially with the Security Council being able to authorize a “military intervention” only “as a last resort”. Then, in 2005, the UN General Assembly endorsed a resolution supporting R2P, and in 2006 the UN Security Council passed resolution 1674 about “the protection of civilians in armed conflict”; they should be protected against “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

Now fast-forward to the end of 2008, early 2009, when Israel – using American fighter jets to raise hell – unleashed a large-scale attack on the civilian population of the Gaza strip.

Look at the official US reaction; “Israel has obviously decided to protect herself and her people,” said then-president Bush. The US Congress voted by a staggering 390-to-5 to recognize “Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza”. The incoming Barack Obama administration was thunderously silent. Only future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We support Israel’s right to self-defense.”

At least 1,300 civilians – including scores of women and children – were killed by state terror in Gaza. Nobody invoked R2P. Nobody pointed to Israel’s graphic failure in its “responsibility to protect” Palestinians. Nobody called for a “humanitarian intervention” targeting Israel.

The mere notion that a superpower – and other lesser powers – make their foreign policy decisions based on humanitarian grounds, such as protecting people under siege, is an absolute joke. So already at the time we learned how R2P was to be instrumentalized. It did not apply to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan. It did not apply to Israel in Palestine. It would eventually apply only to frame “rogue” rulers that are not “our bastards” – as in Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. “Humanitarian” intervention, yes; but only to get rid of “the bad guys.”

And the beauty of R2P was that it could be turned upside down anytime. Bush pleaded for the “liberation” of suffering Afghans – and especially burqa-clad Afghan women – from the “evil” Taliban, in fact configuring Afghanistan as a humanitarian intervention.

And when the bogus links between al-Qaeda and the non-existent WMDs were debunked, Washington began to justify the invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq via … R2P; “responsibility to protect” Iraqis from Saddam, and then to protect Iraqis from themselves.

The Killer Awoke Before Dawn

The most recent installment in serial episodes of war porn is the Kandahar massacre, when, according to the official Pentagon version (or cover up) an American army sergeant, a sniper and Iraqi war veteran – a highly trained assassin – shot 17 Afghan civilians, including nine women and four children, in two villages two miles apart, and burned some of their bodies.

Like with Abu Ghraib, there was the usual torrent of denials from the Pentagon – as in “this is not us” or “we don’t do things these way”; not to mention a tsunami of stories in US corporate media humanizing the hero-turned-mass killer, as in “he’s such a good guy, a family man”. In contrast, not a single word about The Other – the Afghan victims. They are faceless; and nobody knows their names.

A – serious – Afghan enquiry established that some 20 soldiers may have been part of the massacre – as in My Lai in Vietnam; and that included the rape of two of the women. It does make sense. War porn is a lethal, group subculture – complete with targeted assassinations, revenge killings, desecration of bodies, harvesting of trophies (severed fingers or ears), burning of Korans and pissing on dead bodies. It’s essentially a collective sport.

US “kill teams” have deliberately executed random, innocent Afghan civilians, mostly teenagers, for sport, planted weapons on their bodies, and then posed with their corpses as trophies. Not by accident they had been operating out of a base in the same area of the Kandahar massacre.

And we should not forget former top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who in April 10, 2010, admitted, bluntly, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people” who were not a threat to the US or Western civilization.

The Pentagon spins and sells in Afghanistan what it sold in Iraq (and even way back in Vietnam for that matter); the idea that this is a “population-centric counter-insurgency” – or COIN, to “win hearts and minds”, and part of a great nation building project.

This is a monumental lie. The Obama surge in Afghanistan – based on COIN – was a total failure. What replaced it was hardcore, covert, dark war, led by “kill teams” of Special Forces. That implies an inflation of air strikes and night raids. No to mention drone strikes, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal areas, whose favorite targets seem to be Pashtun wedding parties.

Incidentally, the CIA claims that since May 2010, ultra-smart drones have killed more than 600 “carefully selected” human targets – and, miraculously, not a single civilian.

Expect to see this war porn extravaganza celebrated in an orgy of upcoming, joint Pentagon-Hollywood blockbusters. In real life, this is spun by people such as John Nagl, who was on General David Petraeus’ staff in Iraq and now runs the pro-Pentagon think-tank Center for New American Security.

The new stellar macho, macho men may be the commandos under the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). But this a Pentagon production, which has created, according to Nagl, an “industrial strength counter-terrorism killing machine”.

Reality, though, is much more prosaic. COIN techniques, applied by McChrystal, relied on only three components; 24-hour surveillance by drones; monitoring of mobile phones; and pinpointing the physical location of the phones from their signals.

This implies that anyone in an area under a drone watch using a cell phone was branded as a “terrorist”, or at least “terrorist sympathizer”. And then the focus of the night raids in Afghanistan shifted from “high value targets” – high-level and mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban – to anyone who was branded as helping the Taliban.

In May 2009, before McChrystal arrived, US Special Forces were carrying 20 raids a month. By November, they were 90 a month. By the spring of 2010, they were 250 a month. When McChrystal was fired – because of a story in Rolling Stone (he was competing with Lady Gaga for the cover; Lady Gaga won) – and Obama replaced him with Petraeus in the summer of 2010, there were 600 a month. By April 2011, they were more than 1,000 a month.

So this is how it works. Don’t even think of using a cell phone in Kandahar and other Afghan provinces. Otherwise, the “eyes in the sky” are going to get you. At the very least you will be sent to jail, along with thousands of other civilians branded as “terrorist sympathizers”; and intelligence analysts will use your data to compile their “kill/capture list” and catch even more civilians in their net.

As for the civilian “collateral damage” of the night raids, they were always presented by the Pentagon as “terrorists”. Example; in a raid in Gardez on February 12, 2010, two men were killed; a local government prosecutor and an Afghan intelligence official, as well as three women (two of them pregnant). The killers told the US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command in Kabul that the two men were “terrorists” and the women had been found tied up and gagged. Then the actual target of the raid turned himself in for questioning a few days later, and was released without any charges.

That’s just the beginning. Targeted assassination – as practiced in Afghanistan – will be the Pentagon’s tactic of choice in all future US wars.

Pass The Condom, Darling

Libya was a major war porn atrocity exhibition – complete with a nifty Roman touch of the defeated “barbarian” chief sodomized in the streets and then executed, straight on YouTube.

This, by the way, is exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a lightning visit to Tripoli, had announced less than 48 hours before the fact. Gaddafi should be “captured or killed”. When she watched it in the screen of her BlackBerry she could only react with the semantic earthquake “Wow!”

From the minute a UN resolution imposed a no-fly zone over Libya under the cover of R2P, it became a green card to regime change. Plan A was always to capture and kill Gaddafi – as in an Afghan-style targeted assassination. That was the Obama administration official policy. There was no plan B.

Obama said the death of Gaddafi meant, “the strength of American leadership across the world”. That was as “We got him” (echoes of Saddam captured by the Bush administration) as one could possibly expect.

With an extra bonus. Even though Washington paid no less than 80% of the operating costs of those dimwits at NATO (roughly $2 billion), it was still pocket money. Anyway, it was still awkward to say, “We did it”, because the White House always said this was not a war; it was a “kinetic” something. And they were not in charge.

Only the hopelessly naïve may have swallowed the propaganda of NATO’s “humanitarian” 40,000-plus bombing which devastated Libya’s infrastructure back to the Stone Age as a Shock and Awe in slow motion. This never had anything to do with R2P.

This was R2P as safe sex – and the “international community” was the condom. The “international community”, as everyone knows, is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), plus the House of Saud in the shade. The EU, which up to extra time was caressing the helm of Gaddafi’s gowns, took no time to fall over themselves in editorials about the 42-year reign of a “buffoon”.

As for the concept of international law, it was left lying in a drain as filthy as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Saddam at least got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner (he ended up on YouTube as well). Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a territorial invasion of Pakistan (no YouTube – so many don’t believe it). Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out with a mix of air war and assassination. They are The Three Graceful Scalps of War Porn.

Sweet Emotion 

Syria is yet another declination of war porn narrative. If you can’t R2P it, fake it.

And to think that all this was codified such a long time ago. Already in 1997, the US Army War College Quarterly was defining what they called “the future of warfare”. They framed it as “the conflict between information masters and information victims”.

They were sure “we are already masters of information warfare … Hollywood is ‘preparing the battlefield’ … Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable … Our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures … Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating.”

Post-everything information warfare has nothing to do with geopolitics. Just like the proverbial Hollywood product, it is to be “spawned” out of raw emotions; “hatred, jealousy, and greed – emotions, rather than strategy”.

In Syria this is exactly how Western corporate media has scripted the whole movie; the War College “information warfare” tactics in practice. The Syrian government never had much of a chance against those “writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties”.

For example, the armed opposition, the so-called Free Syrian Army (a nasty cocktail of defectors, opportunists, jihadis and foreign mercenaries) brought Western journalists to Homs and then insisted to extract them, in extremely dangerous condition, and with people being killed, via Lebanon, rather than through the Red Crescent. They were nothing else than writing the script for a foreign-imposed “humanitarian corridor” to be opened to Homs. This was pure theater – or war porn packaged as a Hollywood drama.

The problem is Western public opinion is now hostage to this brand of information warfare. Forget about even the possibility of peaceful negotiations among adult parties. What’s left is a binary good guys versus bad guys plot, where the Big Bad Guy must be destroyed at all costs (and on top of it his wife is a snob bitch who loves shopping!)

Only the terminally naïve may believe that jihadis – including Libya’s NATO rebels – financed by the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, also know as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are a bunch of democratic reformists burning with good intentions. Even Human Rights Watch was finally forced to acknowledge that these armed “activists” were responsible for “kidnapping, detention, and torture”, after receiving reports of “executions by armed opposition groups of security force members and civilians”.

What this (soft and hard) war porn narrative veils, in the end, is the real Syrian tragedy; the impossibility for the much-lauded “Syrian people” to get rid of all these crooks – the Assad system, the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Syrian National Council, and the mercenary-infested Free Syrian Army.

Listen To The Sound of Chaos 

This – very partial – catalogue of sorrows inevitably brings us to the current supreme war porn blockbuster – the Iran psychodrama.

2012 is the new 2002; Iran is the new Iraq; and whatever the highway, to evoke the neo-con motto, real men go to Tehran via Damascus, or real men go to Tehran non-stop.

Perhaps only underwater in the Arctic we would be able to escape the cacophonous cortege of American right-wingers – and their respective European poodles – salivating for blood and deploying the usual festival of fallacies like “Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map”, “diplomacy has run its course”, “the sanctions are too late”, or “Iran is within a year, six months, a week, a day, or a minute of assembling a bomb”. Of course these dogs of war would never bother to follow what the International Atomic Energy Agency is actually doing, not to mention the National Intelligence Estimates released by the 17 US intelligence agencies.

Because they, to a great extent, are “writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties” in terms of corporate media, they can get away with an astonishingly toxic fusion of arrogance and ignorance – about the Middle East, about Persian culture, about Asian integration, about the nuclear issue, about the oil industry, about the global economy, about “the Rest” as compared to “the West”.

Just like with Iraq in 2002, Iran is always dehumanized. The relentless, totally hysterical, fear-inducing “narrative” of “should we bomb now or should we bomb later” is always about oh so very smart bunker buster bombs and precision missiles that will accomplish an ultra clean large-scale devastation job without producing a single “collateral damage”. Just like safe sex.

And even when the voice of the establishment itself – the New York Times – admits that neither US nor Israeli intelligence believe Iran has decided to build a bomb (a 5-year-old could reach the same conclusion), the hysteria remains inter-galactic.

Meanwhile, while it gets ready – “all options are on the table”, Obama himself keeps repeating – for yet another war in what it used to call “arc of instability”, the Pentagon also found time to repackage war porn. It took only a 60-second video now on YouTube, titled Toward the Sound of Chaos, released only a few days after the Kandahar massacre. Just look at its key target audience: the very large market of poor, unemployed and politically very naïve young Americans.

Let’s listen to the mini-movie voice over: “Where chaos looms, the Few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair – with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can’t help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time.”

Maybe, in this Orwellian universe, we should ask the dead Afghans urinated upon by US Marines, or the thousands of dead in Fallujah, to write a movie review. Well, dead men don’t write. Maybe we could think about the day NATO enforces a no-fly one over Saudi Arabia to protect the Shi’ites in the eastern province, while Pentagon drones launch a carpet of Hellfire missiles over those thousands of arrogant, medieval, corrupt House of Saud princes. No, it’s not going to happen.

Over a decade after the beginning of the war on terror, this is what the world is coming to; a lazy, virtually worldwide audience, jaded, dazed and distracted from distraction by distraction, helplessly hooked on the shabby atrocity exhibition of war porn.

Source: Asia Times

To Disavow or Debate Abunimah

To disavow or debate Abunimah – this is the question. Indeed, an American citizen, born in Jordan, who never tread on the land of Palestine, decided to ostracize Gilad Atzmon, a native Palestinian, born and bred on its soil  – a silly idea! Next step, he will forbid earthquakes and hurricanes to occur.

For me, there is a terrible sense of deja-vu. Some ten years ago, the same Abunimah and his obese Lebanese partner successfullyhunted me out of the pro-Palestinian movement, saying that without Shamir, they will win sooner. Ten years passed, and the movement did not get to the mark it was then.

This repeat proves that Abunimah is nothing but a gatekeeper on the payroll of his Jewish Zionist friends. They pay him with the currency he appreciates: publicity and access to the Jewish-owned media. Totally unheard of previously, his articles began to be published in the important American papers. Some friendly Jews set him up with his Electronic Intifada. They keep the discourse within its permitted limits.

This is expected: the Palestinian discourse is heavily policed one; the Jews can’t allow it to run free so they would not get unexpected results. They deform it by using their anti-zionist agents like despicable Roland Rance and feeble Tony Greenstein, and their Palestinian stooges like Abunimah. You can easily understand who is doing their work: they are allowed to appear in the mainstream media on regular basis, so they have to be enemies.

And despite revulsion I feel every time his name is mentioned, I’d say: something good may come even of an Abunimah. Remember Gollum who helped to destroy the Ring: even he was useful, in the last run. So one does not have to ostracise him; let us tolerate him until his own brothers will deal with this treacherous beast as he deserves.

As for Gilad Atzmon, his recent writing disappointed me, for he went heavily into navel-glazing of Jewish identity search. In my view, this is a dead-end; but a writer and a thinker should be allowed to explore dead-ends. And anyway, nobody forces us to read all these endless soul-search reports. Still, he wrote many wonderful pieces and will write many more, after he will exhaust his soul-searching.

However, as I wrote previously, his writing is fully within the framework of Jewish thought, partly in the tradition of Weininger and early Zionists, partly in the latest post-Zionist Israeli line. Our Arab brothers, perhaps, are not sufficiently aware of that; their interference is utterly out-of-place in this inter-Jewish polemics. The most important signee against Gilad, the heir to Edward Said’s cathedra in the Columbia U, Joseph Massad, whom I do respect for his brave struggle against the Gay International, failed to understand it again: years ago, he proclaimed Israel Shahak, another inter-Jewish heretic, “an anti-Semite”. Our Arab brothers will do well if they will stand out of this debate: let the Jews fight out the battle for their identity. As it happens, Gilad is their strongest champion on the Jewish side, they should cheer, not discourage him.

9/11 Foreknowledge Caught On Computers That Measure Global Mind

Fascinating research into a “global mind” picked up startling data in the days and hours before the 9/11 attacks, indicating widespread foreknowledge.

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) uses electromagnetically-shielded computers located throughout the world that generate random numbers. In its 13-year history, these computers show statistically significant deviations during global events that affect humans.

What GCP found on 9/11 shows foreknowledge for nearly 16 hours before the first plane struck. This data lends support to the proposition that several hundred people around the world had time-specific information about the attacks.

“Roger Nelson has spent the past 30 years looking for evidence of a global mind,” says Morgan Freeman, host of the Science TV series, Through the Wormhole. [1] Nelson is an experimental psychologist and founder of GCP.

Whether called the “noosphere,” some “morphic field” or “information field,” the global mind is real, believes Nelson, along with many other scientists. Though much weaker than the obvious five, experiments indicate that the “sixth sense” is part of a global communication network that can be indirectly measured.

While the US military has long been involved in psi research, GCP tries to objectively measure interconnected consciousness through scientific means, and freely releases that information to the public. [2]

Located throughout the world, some 80 stand-alone computers randomly generate ones or zeros for GCP. [3] These random number event generators (REGs) stop working sometimes.

“The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators, apparently ‘causing’ them to produce non-random patterns,” GCP says. [4]

An EGG (ElectroGaiaGraph) studies a REG’s ability (or inability) to generate random data and calculates the range of deviation from randomness. The following graph [5] shows the cumulative deviation for all the REGs in the GCP network from 9/10 thru 9/12:

The teal “pseudo data” is automatically generated random data to compare to the red actual data. The black and white boxes on the zero line represent the following events:

..8:46 am WTC1 hit
..9:02 am WTC2 hit
..9:37 am Pentagon hit
..9:59 am WTC2 collapses
10:28 am WTC1 collapse

At the time, 37 EGGs produced data for the network. [6] Notice the bump that starts at about 20 hours GMT on Sept. 10 (4 pm Eastern Daylight Time). That’s when several of the REG computers stopped producing random numbers. Increasing randomness returns (the declining side of the hump) until about 32 hours, or 4:00 am EDT on Sept. 11.

Then, starting at about 4:30 am – over four hours before the first strike on 9/11 – the REGs seriously stopped producing random numbers, creating the spike we see before the North Tower (World Trade Center 1) was hit at 36:46 (8:46 am EDT).

In 2011, GCP founder Roger Nelson told Through the Wormhole that the anomaly is “highly significant,” adding further:

“This is an aberration in the random line… We don’t have an explanation for that.”

However, in 2009, GCP clarified that “a conservative reading suggests that measure is just marginally significant.” [6]

In a 2009 speech, Nelson reported that the GCP found the same precognition before large land-based earthquakes (but not for ocean-based ones). [7] Animals are known to perceive quakes before humans do, and GCP acknowledges that the network “could equally well pick up on the consciousness of animals other than humans. For now we take it to mean that the system detects some sort of global consciousness structure.” [8]

The GCP network became operational in August 1998. Since then, “the overall statistics for the project indicate odds of about 1-in-20 million that the correlation of our data with global events is merely a chance fluctuation,” reports Nelson. [9]

In a paper discussing the 9/11 anomaly, Nelson admits:

“We do not have solid grounds to claim that the statistics and graphs demonstrate the existence of a global consciousness. On the other hand, we do have strong evidence of anomalous structure in what should be random data, and clear correspondence of these unexplained departures from expectation with well-defined events that are of special importance to people.” [10]

But, since computers are electronic devices, couldn’t the high stress on the power grid or high use of cell phones have altered REG outputs?

“Such influences would center on New York and Washington, of course, while the eggs are distributed around the world. Their average distance from New York is more than 4000 miles (6400 km), and the anomalous effects are broadly distributed across the network.”

Also, the research-grade instruments are physically shielded from electromagnetism and include “a logic stage that literally excludes first-order biasing from electromagnetic or other physical causes.”

But then, relating to the anomalous spikes that precede the towers being hit, he adds:

“If ordinary waking consciousness were the source, it would seem it could only be attributable to a small number of people: the terrorists who knew what was coming. Alternatively, the hypothesized ‘global consciousness’ that later would be intensely aware might have had a premonitory cognition or feeling at an unconscious level that was registered in the data from the EGG network.”

Because he believes only “a small number of people” were involved, Nelson repeats the suggestion in Through the Wormhole that global consciousness had an unconscious “premonition” about 9/11.

Hold onto that thought while we look in more detail at what Nelson describes is being measured:

“The best bets are quantum mechanical entanglemant [sic] (operating in a quasi-macroscopic realm) and ‘active information’ a conceptual structure in David Bohm’s physics.” [11]

David Bohm (1917-1992) distinguished himself from classical quantum physicists with the notion that our universe is guided not only by matter and energy, but also by a “nonlocal active information” field – the idea that on a quantum level, information acts on raw energy to give it form. [12]

“Quantum entanglement is a state in which quantum particles can alter one another’s properties instantaneously and at a distance, in a way which would not be possible if they were large scale objects obeying the laws of classical as opposed to quantum physics,” explains Quantum Mind, a 2011 book collecting the thoughts of various theorists. [13]

Erwin Schrödinger coined the term in 1935, saying:

“I would not call [entanglement] one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought.” [14]

Quantum Mind explains further: “The quantum mind or quantum consciousness hypothesis proposes that classical mechanics cannot fully explain consciousness, and suggests that quantum mechanical phenomena, such as quantum entanglement and superposition, may play an important part in the brain’s function, and could form the basis of an explanation of consciousness.” [15]

Returning to Nelson:

“My own ‘model’ is that consciousness or mind is the source or seat of a nonlocal, active information field (this is not a standard, well defined physical construct). Such fields interact, usually with random phase relationship and no detectable product. When some or many consciousness (information) fields are driven in common, or for whatever reason become coherent and resonant, they interact in phase, and create a new, highly structured information field… that becomes the source of the effects we measure.” [11]

It’s even possible that the low 34% occupancy rate for all four planes [16] reportedly involved in the attack indicates that some people picked up on that information field and avoided buying seats on those planes.

But it wasn’t just a dozen terrorists and their cohorts hiding in Afghan caves who created this structured field. A vast amount of evidence shows that hundreds of people spread all over the world had foreknowledge, comporting with GCP’s anomalous effects being “broadly distributed across the network.”

Rather than premonition, it’s more likely that GCP captured the “highly structured information field” created by foreknowledge among financial, military and political figures, along with the global intelligence community.

Please support my work by reading the full piece at Activist Post. Thanks!

The DHS Defends Globalism, Not America

The Department Of Homeland Security is the very epitome of unnecessary bureaucracy.  Its formation was predicated on the existence of terrorist threats, many of which the U.S. government and orbiting alphabet agencies either created through acts of war, or fabricated out of thin air.  Its policies of centralization were sold to the public as necessary to prevent systemic “miscommunications” that never actually took place.  Throughout our history, it has been a rare occasion indeed when an attack falls upon American infrastructure or interests that was not influenced, directly or indirectly, by the actions of agencies which were supposedly employed to prevent such events from ever occurring.  Whether through ‘blowback’, or through ‘false flag’, frankly, most of the harm that comes to our nation is perpetrated by the guiding hand of our inexorably corrupt government.

Knowing that the DHS was established on false pretenses forces us to question the agency’s true intentions, especially when a professional fear-monger like Secretary Janet Napolitano announces that the globalization of the world economy falls within her jurisdiction:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/01/27/the-urgent-need-to-protect-the-global-supply-chain/

Average citizens would assume that the DHS is a U.S.-centric institution, and regardless of its Orwellian behavior, is at the very least a distinctly American brand of tyranny.  However, under encroaching strategies enforced since 2006 through the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP), it is becoming very apparent that the Department Of Homeland Security is quickly taking on an “all-of-nation” role, most prominently in the defense of globalization:

http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/NIPP_Plan.pdf

In her most recent op-ed / propaganda piece published by Reuters, Napolitano makes it clear that the business of the DHS is lately focused on what she calls “global supply chain security”.  This by itself could be seen as a perfectly logical extension of the DHS mandate to protect America.  Unfortunately, the situation is not that simple.  A few talking points and guidelines within the NIPP platform are rather disturbing, and create an open door for the internationalization of the DHS.

Ironically, Napolitano sets the stage first by pointing out the brittle nature of globalization, along with its numerous vulnerabilities:

“A vulnerability or gap in any part of the world has the ability to affect the flow of goods and people thousands of miles away. For instance, just three days after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear tragedies struck Japan last March, U.S. automakers began cutting shifts and idling some plants at home. In the days that followed, they did the same at their factories in more than 10 countries around the world…”

As I have pointed out many times in the past, the utter lack of redundancy within our globalized system makes it the most impractical and downright destructive economic model in history.  Janet Napolitano seems to agree at least in part on this point.  The problem is that the weaknesses of globalization are not a mistake; they are a deliberate and useful tool for further centralization of once sovereign economies.  Instead of addressing the obvious concern that globalization does not work, Napolitano, like every other globalist in our government, claims that it must be propped up at all costs for the “greater good”:

“Because protecting the global supply chain is inherently an international challenge, it will take an international effort to meet it. The tremendous benefits we all reap from an interdependent global economy means that we are all stakeholders in the security of that system…”

“…we will continue to think globally, enhancing our coordination with the international community and international stakeholders who have key supply chain roles and responsibilities. We will seek to develop and implement global standards, strengthen detection, interdiction, and information-sharing capabilities, and promote end-to-end supply chain security efforts with the international community.”

What “benefits” are we “reaping” from globalization?  I haven’t the foggiest idea.  The internationalization of banking and finance has led to the creation and subsequent implosion of the world’s largest debt bubble and further devaluation of many of the world’s currencies.  Centralized and corporatized food production has led to a complete lack of self reliance within our society, contributed to food scarcity, not abundance, and opened our means of sustenance to the mad-science and genetic criminality of monstrous entities like Monsanto.  The globalization of law through treaty has supplanted the U.S. Constitution, fed the growth of unaccountable and unelected councils and committees, and stricken our country with policy initiatives that weren’t even written by officials that live here.  There are absolutely no substantial benefits to globalization that outweigh its considerable detriments, unless, of course, you are one of the elite few who stand at the helm of the machine.

At the Davos Economic Summit which took place in the final week of January, Napolitano announced a program called the “National Strategy For Global Supply Chain Security”:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/national_strategy_for_global_supply_chain_security.pdf

Within this plan, the DHS seeks to unite with international corporate interests in an effort to ensure the dominance of the globalist ideal of centralized economy.  The collectivist rhetoric inherent within the document above is apparent.  Napolitano summarizes it well when she states:

“As globalization brings nations closer together, we need to jointly disprove and leave behind the notion that security and efficiency cannot coexist, and together build a security architecture that better uses information to assess risk. By taking a coordinated, strategic and thoughtful approach, we can expedite legitimate commerce while focusing our attention on that much smaller portion that poses harm. Security and confidence in the global supply chain enhance our collective economic strength, rather than impeding progress.”

Napolitano treats globalism as an inevitability; a future without recourse and without option.  A smart person might ask; “What business is it of Janet Napolitano to comment on the global economic model, let alone utilize DHS resources in its defense!”  But look at it this way; by using the failings of globalization and the spectral boogie-man of terrorism as a rationale, the DHS has created a grey area in which the U.S. government can be more fully integrated into the global corporate dynamic, which furthers the disintegration of American sovereignty.

The global supply chain encompasses everything!  It is a vast artificial international construct.  For the DHS to truly “defend” its integrity, it will be REQUIRED to sacrifice the specific and sovereign interests of the U.S.  In a globalized trade system, every economy is important, as long as it does not compete with any other economy.  The U.S. economy is no exception.  Harmonization diminishes the wealth of more successful nations and transfers it to less successful nations.  This transfer of wealth does, in a sense, create equality; it makes everyone equally poor.  By becoming the militant hand of globalization, the DHS is put in the position of hurting America in order to “save” America.

The National Strategy For Global Supply Chain Security document is extraordinarily vague when it comes to the manner in which the DHS will implement defense directives.  More DHS agents at shipping ports?  Of course.  More DHS involvement in airline cargo centers?  Certainly.  But what about DHS agents overseeing trucking and freight, or even stationed at highway checkpoints (remember, the TSA is an agency under the direct authority of the DHS)?  What about DHS agents acting as permanent corporate liaisons?  Will corporations decide who is a threat to the global supply chain and who isn’t?  What about the usage of copyrighted materials on the internet?  Is this a disruption of global trade?  How does the DHS actually plan to return a disrupted supply line to normal efficiency?  The DHS has no production capacity, and would have to TAKE (possibly by force) a supply from somewhere in order to reinstitute it elsewhere.  What about communities, states, or countries which refuse to participate in globalization?  What about those who choose to decentralize?  Could this not be labeled as an attempt to derail the global system, and thus be interpreted as an act of terrorism?

Under any collectivist society, the act of non-participation is always painted as an attack on the group.  In a fully interdependent system, refusing to contribute automatically hurts others, and therefore, makes you a criminal by default.  These systems are built this way deliberately, in order to control a population by exploiting their sense of innate guilt.  The DHS may claim a limited involvement in globalization, restricted to security issues, but the very process of integration with the international corporate framework as well as foreign institutions makes the agency a catalyst for forced collectivism.  Bombs in shipping containers (the bombs we’re supposed to believe are everywhere), do not warrant the massive shift of our security apparatus into a policy of global centralization.  In the end, this move on the part of the DHS has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with manipulating the attitude of the general public towards globalization.  It is much more difficult to challenge a methodology when that methodology is suddenly treated as a national security issue, and is defended by an army of bureaucrats and blue-shirted thugs.  When a world view is made violently essential to the very survival of a people, defiance is held tantamount to treason, and change, no matter how wise, becomes impossible.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

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